Art Kavanagh

An educationalist who really wanted to encourage his or her charges to read would simply allocate one afternoon a week to “reading”, offering a wide selection of titles from every age and genre, and leave the children to get on with it, having first placed them in a technology-free environment.

I never saw that BBC Panorama programme and I still somehow managed to get the impression that Trump had urged his supporters to overthrow the 2020 election result. How did that happen? It can’t have been all the BBC’s fault.

The Overspill’s Charles Arthur can’t remember how he learned to read but knows it can’t have been the “three cues” method. I’m sure I was taught using phonics. I’m lucky the school didn’t use the “whole word” approach, as I can’t, and couldn’t then, mentally store visual images of words.

Further down that same post from Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History: Cognitive dissonance tests fail to replicate!

According to the Doomsday Scoreboard, there have been over 200 failed apocalypse predictions and, uh, zero successful ones.

So far. From Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History

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.

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 📺

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.

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

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”?