Talk about books: a fortnightly publication about things I’ve read
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.
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.
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?
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 🙁
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.
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.
A look at Andrew Marvell’s use of second person singular pronouns in “To His Coy Mistress” (and a few paragraphs about “The Gallery”)
I just Googled one of my own publications as a quick, handy way to find the citation details, to include in a blog post. Google’s AI summary was — surprise, surprise! — way off, totally misleading. Why would anybody think that this garbage is useful or helpful?
Remember “grey goo”? Why hasn’t it destroyed the world yet? Techno-pipe dreams