Art Kavanagh

Squeaky shoes are so “embarrassing” that wearers have filed a lawsuit (FT so probably paywalled.) My mother used to say that if shoes squeaked it meant you hadn’t paid for them yet.

Two translated novellas from the recent Penguin Archive series, set at the beginning and end respectively of the Second World War.

I’ve been buying pitta bread in Aldi rather than Lidl because the Aldi ones are labelled “Wholemeal” while the Lidl ones are just “Brown”. I read the ingredients list now and they’re basically the same: Aldi ones have a mixture of wholemeal and other flour. So, back to the more convenient Lidl.

I’ve just noticed that En Attendant, the 2021 album by Marcin Wasilewski Trio, was recorded in the same place (France), same month (Aug 2019) and by the same team as the Joe Lovano/Wasilewski Trio Arctic Riff (2020). So I’m guessing they recorded the trio album while waiting for JL to turn up 🎶

I was on my way into Westport for Nils Kavanagh’s album launch but turned back after 2½ Km. It’s been 10 years since I rode a bike at night. I bought new lights yesterday (€40) but the front one is meant to make me visible to others, not to illuminate the path. Too many unlit obstacles. Tant pis.

Zoë lacks [Jackson] Lamb’s physical repulsiveness, however, and she has an active sex life — though, unfortunately, not with her husband.

Unfortunately for whom, I wonder? Laura Miller, who of course has read the Zoë Boehm books, on Apple tv’s Down Cemetery Road 📺

Adam Mastroianni (Experimental History) on the decline of deviance. Why people are less weird than they (we) used to be, and why that isn’t always a good thing.

Why dating feels so uniquely hard in your forties it says here. Uniquely hard? I can’t say I’ve noticed it getting appreciably easier in the almost 20 years since I left my 40s behind.

I finished Eimer McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians last night, having been immersed in it for 6 or 7 days. Still wholly undecided as to whether I liked it, but very relieved to be free of it at last 📚

Last night I had one of those tedious, repetitive dreams in which I was attempting to read the new Thomas Pynchon and getting nowhere. In waking life, I’ve been slogging away at Eimear McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians, and after several days have managed to reach page 42. What to make of that?

Paraphrased from Margaret Atwood: “men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them.” True, but not the whole story. Men are afraid that women will laugh at them or other men will kill them; women are afraid that men will kill them or other women will laugh at them.

Bloody hell, Joshua Orpin doesn’t look much like Eric Porter, does he? A “reimagining” indeed 📺

Millie Gibson as Irene and Joshua Orpin as Soames in The Forsytes

I added today’s newsletter post to the list of authors discussed in Talk about books under John Carey’s name alone. Though the post refers to Marvell, Empson and John Creaser among others, none of them is its main focus, I think.

A rather outdated, and probably redundant, argument that, in literary criticism, intentionalism is not a fallacy nor is paraphrase a heresy.

In its own odd and organic way, Ireland repurposed a largely ceremonial office in order to fill a vacuum.

Fintan O’Toole has some thought-provoking remarks about the current Irish presidential election.

Poor Graham Norton. I thought he had managed to escape chat show hell by becoming a successful novelist. Apparently it’s not that easy

Two novels that deal with allegations of plagiarism, with authors suspected of telling the stories that should more properly be told by others

I need some method of holding a paperback open while I’m typing (copying a passage from it) without breaking the spine. A book snake or something like that. The one I’m reading at the moment, published by Faber, is particularly prone to springing closed 🙁

How about “Neatly tied up and unflinching”?

FT-Edit poll asking “How do you like your endings — Neatly tied up and hopeful or Unflinching and messy?

The short stories in Sarah Hall’s collection, Sudden Traveller (2019) at first seem vaguely disturbing. On closer examination, several of them turn out to be very disturbing indeed.

Over the past decades, I have met the real-life Bob Woodward a couple of times. He’s a somewhat curmudgeonly so-and-so. Sadly, I never met Redford, who played him much better.

David Parsley picks Redford’s 5 best films. No real surprises. Condor is at least as much a Christmas film as Die Hard.

Here’s a story (FT, so probably paywalled) about the jacket that Robert Redford wore in Three Days of the Condor. Perhaps the least unsatisfactory of Sydney Pollack’s films, the movie is now 50 years old.

Glad to hear that Heather Humphreys didn’t waste her time learning Irish while she was a minister. If she chooses to do so if she’s elected, that might be a good use of her time as President. Heather Humphreys pledges to learn Irish — 11 years after pledge to learn Irish

… it’s possible for a medium to be in terminal decline for centuries.

says Kenneth Whyte of Sutherland House publishers: Book publishing’s big shrink 📚

Sad and shocked to hear that Conor Gearty has died. He was in my year in UCD in the 70s. I hadn’t seen him since then but I still recognized his distinctive voice on the radio.