10-Dec-2024:
I wanted to see the new Brad Mehldau trio in Nancy in October but didn’t get my act together. And now that very concert has turned up on RTE’s website! Rossy’s …
08-Dec-2024:
I just accidentally discovered the maximum size of a note in Tot (⚠️ Mac App Store link). Each note is limited to 100,000 characters.
04-Dec-2024:
Just finished Belinda McKeon’s Tender 📚. I’ll be rereading it and writing something about it in Talk about books in the next few months. This post is just to …
30-Nov-2024:
The current Talk about books post is about Iris Murdoch’s 1973 novel, The Black Prince. I make a highly tendentious and unsupported suggestion a few paragraphs …
30-Nov-2024:
A fancy prose style: Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince, the narrative of a man imprisoned for murder who has previously had a sexual relationship with a much younger female character, …
24-Nov-2024:
Sarah Ditum on Kirsty McColl in The Critic. Not long before she was killed, McColl recorded some of the songs written by Phil Chevron for his …
24-Nov-2024:
It seems that Books at One might be in difficulty, according to this subscriber-only story in The Irish Times. That would be a shame.
23-Nov-2024:
This morning I started to write a post responding to Anil Dash’s “Don’t call it a Substack” from a few days ago. I got to about 400 words but decided (not for …
23-Nov-2024:
I don’t know why I don’t keep the orientation lock on my phone all the time. I almost never want to view it in landscape 🤷♂️
17-Nov-2024:
But yolked [sic] together like this, they’re each diminished.
Rachel Cooke is not impressed by Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz. She makes it sound a bit …
16-Nov-2024:
Today’s post from Talk about books is about Claire Keegan’s second collection of short stories, Walk the Blue Fields. It marks the end of the fourth year of …
16-Nov-2024:
Open secrets: Claire Keegan, Walk the Blue Fields Claire Keegan’s second collection of short stories, Walk the Blue Fields, is shorter, tighter and more mature than her first. Also, it seems to me that the …
16-Nov-2024:
My Bluesky feed 🦋 is full of people promoting “starter packs” for topics I’m not interested in. (I don’t mean yours!) Even where I am interested, I wouldn’t …
13-Nov-2024:
Farewell to Roy Haynes. Sad, of course, but he had reached a good age 🎶
12-Nov-2024:
Fred Kaplan has written a novel and it sounds intriguing: Ethan Iverson’s Transitional Technology 📚
10-Nov-2024:
I’m getting really fed up of Substack’s RSS feeds; they really ought to fix them.
10-Nov-2024:
My post on Grotius and the minimalist theory of natural law, which has been getting far more hits than any other post on my personal site, has just dropped off …
10-Nov-2024:
Just posted on my personal site: Wigs on the green: The resignation of Hugh O’Flaherty from the Irish Supreme Court. I’m still annoyed about a 25-year-old Irish …
09-Nov-2024:
In the past Lammy has called Trump a ‘woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath’.
David Lammy has been fighting for his job. Gosh, I wonder why Lammy would …
09-Nov-2024:
In today’s email from The Fortnightly, Julian Gridham links to a post of his from a few years ago On the Design of Poetry Textbooks. Reading that prompted me to …
04-Nov-2024:
I know this is not a time for silly, wild-ass speculation, so forgive me, but … you don’t suppose the Trump campaign could have been bullying pollsters to make …
03-Nov-2024:
Today’s Talk about books post was supposed to be about three Roman plays by Shakespeare but I didn’t manage to get as far as Coriolanus, so I’ll probably do a …
03-Nov-2024:
All honourable men: Shakespeare’s Romans Shakespeare’s Roman plays, Julius Cæsar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus are all formally tragedies. That’s not to say that they all follow a similar …
31-Oct-2024:
Computer guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to walk in. The cautionary tale of Goldman and Apple’s credit card
30-Oct-2024:
Clint Eastwood has just directed another movie, at 94: Juror #2 🍿
30-Oct-2024:
I’m going back and forth about whether I should be worried about the US presidential election. On the one hand, the result will certainly have repercussions for …
28-Oct-2024:
I’ve decided what to do about LinkedIn (something I was dithering about a few weeks ago) and updated my profile there accordingly.
27-Oct-2024:
I’ve changed the way I do the “description” for my newsletter posts. Now, I’m using Hugo’s Summary method, with the first paragraph styled using the CSS …
19-Oct-2024:
The latest Talk about books is about the second of Wilkie Collins’s four major novels of the 1860s, in which the Vanstone sisters, Norah and Magdalen, suddenly …
19-Oct-2024:
Incontestable wills: Wilkie Collins, No Name The novel that Wilkie Collins published between The Woman in White and Armadale might at first seem less compelling than either of those but it’s a powerful …
17-Oct-2024:
Unintended consequences: deposit return scheme leading to more litter
16-Oct-2024:
This summary is written at average reading age and whilst it does not form part of the judgment it must be reproduced with it.
Maybe because I’m used to legal …
15-Oct-2024:
Hi @manton, I deleted templates authorslist.md and layouts/authorslist/single.html because they wouldn’t behave as I wanted. Instead, I made a new redirect from …
14-Oct-2024:
Cecily Carver doesn’t want to use her Substack to do literary takedowns of buzzy contemporary novels by women, but in the case of Miranda July’s All Fours 📚she …
12-Oct-2024:
An unusually wrongheaded post from Terence Eden: How to make Markdown footnotes start at zero. First, footnotes in HTML (and so in Markdown) are a kludge, and …
11-Oct-2024:
Nicholas Carr is on Substack now, with New Cartographies, and he’s closing down his old blog, Rough Type where he’s been posting only sporadically in recent …
09-Oct-2024:
“ It is probably the most ill-advised legal action since Oscar Wilde put pen to writ.”
What, worse than Gillian Taylforth’s? (Or William Roache’s, for that …
05-Oct-2024:
The latest from Talk about books is about the “Ode to a Nightingale” and the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” Terrible beauty, unpalatable truth: Remarks on some of …
05-Oct-2024:
Terrible beauty, unpalatable truth: Remarks on some of Keats’s odes In which I follow up a post on my personal site from a few months ago, about the regrettable narrowness of my taste in poetry, with a look at two of Keats’s …
01-Oct-2024:
I’m already having second thoughts about automatically crossposting from Micro․blog to LinkedIn. I’m afraid it might make me more reticent about what I post to …
30-Sep-2024:
TIL that the site of the former, much missed, AMT kiosk at Heuston is now occupied by a Caffè Nero Express. That’s a lot better than nothing and will have to …
30-Sep-2024:
Now that I’ve retired and don’t expect to be looking for work again, I’ve been thinking about how I use LinkedIn. For the past few years, I’ve been using it …
21-Sep-2024:
Today’s Talk about books post is about the short stories of Shirley Hazzard, particularly those from her first collection, Cliffs of Fall, and the ones that …
21-Sep-2024:
Trying to keep the poetry separate: Shirley Hazzard, Collected Stories Shirley Hazzard’s short stories fall into two broad categories, those about working for the UN (“the Organization”), and those about men, women, relationships …
20-Sep-2024:
What was a dead judge doing in the courthouse anyway?
15-Sep-2024:
I want to make a kind of “author index” of the writers I’ve been writing about in my newsletter, Talk about books. I suppose the obvious way would be to create …
12-Sep-2024:
I used to work beside Old Street roundabout from 1988 to 1991 inclusive, haven’t been back for at least 25 years. Amazed to think that the “jumbotron” is still …
12-Sep-2024:
While I was reading this fascinating Guardian “long read” on my phone, the page automatically reloaded twice, each time losing me my place. Do news sites not …
09-Sep-2024:
I’m shocked to read that drummer Martin France has died, aged 60. I know his work from the trio with John Taylor and Palle Danielsson. I had just been listening …
07-Sep-2024:
My latest post in Talk about books is about two novels from the early 2010s dealing with rural Ireland in the wake of the economic crash a few years earlier: …
07-Sep-2024:
Down the country: Donal Ryan, The Spinning Heart; and Belinda McKeon, Solace Two novels about rural Ireland in the wake of the economic crash, published in 2011 and 2012 respectively, make for an interesting comparison both with each …
01-Sep-2024:
On a third reading of Caoilinn Hughes’s second novel 📖, I’m still confused as to what’s going on in the court case at the end. So is the first-person narrator: …
31-Aug-2024:
I’m watching a YouTube video of an interview with automatically generated subtitles. In the space of a minute, it has rendered “dreaming” as “streaming” and …
28-Aug-2024:
My resistance to the idea that I’m going to have to read (and buy, though not necessarily in that order) Bridget Hourican’s bio of James Clarence Mangan 📖 has …
27-Aug-2024:
Here’s an unusually informative story on Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM). Nice to have confirmation that others have similar experiences to …
25-Aug-2024:
Claire Kilroy published her fifth novel, Soldier Sailor, last year and it caused a stir. The three previous novels look like an unusually varied bunch but what …
25-Aug-2024:
Deal with the devil: Three novels by Claire Kilroy Claire Kilroy published her fifth novel, Soldier Sailor, last year and it caused a stir. The three previous novels look like an unusually varied bunch but what …
18-Aug-2024:
Why I don’t intend to stop reading Alice Munro’s short stories, notwithstanding her appalling behaviour towards her youngest daughter.
10-Aug-2024:
The latest post from Talk about books is about Melissa Bank’s two books 📖. They look like collections of “linked short stories”, but the links are deeper and …
10-Aug-2024:
Multiple endings: The linked short story collections of Melissa Bank Melissa Bank’s two books look like collections of “linked short stories”, but the links are deeper and the stories or episodes more tightly integrated into an …
09-Aug-2024:
If it’s anything, journalism is the war of facts against narrative. Conspiracists swallow the narrative and ignore the facts.
Helen Lewis, commenting on the …
07-Aug-2024:
The Corporation’s durability is remarkable. Already half a millennium old when Shakespeare arrived in London, its supporters see the survival of its rights and …
05-Aug-2024:
Hi @manton, I thought I’d have another go at crossposting to BlueSky, having given it a miss for a few months. It still doesn’t seem to work. Any idea why? It’s …
05-Aug-2024:
When I started my newsletter, I used to write my posts every second Wednesday. As they got longer and I got older and tireder, I’d start my posts every second …
05-Aug-2024:
I forgot that I’d switched to Hex keyboard input so as to type a “thin space”, and thought that my Option key had stopped working! Panic over.
03-Aug-2024:
The Stand describes a world laid waste by a weaponised super-flu virus nicknamed “Captain Trips” that has escaped from a biolab.
Donal Ryan on Stephen King. So …
03-Aug-2024:
Katie Herzog recently learned that she has aphantasia. It sounds to me as if she has SDAM too. She’s refreshingly sceptical of the consensus view that it’s not …
28-Jul-2024:
Here’s another post from Talk about books. This time, I’m discussing Scott Turow’s third and fourth novels, 📖 Pleading Guilty (1993) and The Laws of Our Fathers …
28-Jul-2024:
Impeaching his own witness: Scott Turow, Pleading Guilty and The Laws of Our Fathers Scott Turow’s third and fourth novels are where his practice of doing something different each time, avoiding formulae and patterns, first becomes conspicuous, …
25-Jul-2024:
I’m going to have to stop buying secondhand books from the UK. I recently ordered a book via Alibris; it was posted on 2 July and it still hasn’t arrived. This …
25-Jul-2024:
Gosh, Stuart Jeffries didn’t like Paul Foot very much, did he? Review of Margaret Renn’s Foot biography 📚
24-Jul-2024:
Via John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog
20-Jul-2024:
I just noticed that because of an error on the index page of my personal site my post “Did William Empson have ADHD?” has till now been inaccessible from the …
18-Jul-2024:
Here’s a list of “5 great underrated film performances by Nicolas Cage” that doesn’t include either of my two favourites, Brian de Palma’s Snake Eyes (1998) or …
14-Jul-2024:
Just posted in Talk about books: my discussion of Mary Gaitskill’s second collection of short stories, Because They Wanted To 📖 (1997)
14-Jul-2024:
“I have deep longings that will never be satisfied”: Mary Gaitskill, Because They Wanted To Several of the short stories in Mary Gaitskill’s second collection, originally published in 1997, deal with desires that may be incapable of fulfilment, and …
10-Jul-2024:
This is priceless! From Noahpinion
09-Jul-2024:
The nag screens that The Guardian uses instead of a paywall are not undismissable, even on a tiny iPhone Mini, but dismissing them is really counterintuitive. …
09-Jul-2024:
Slate’s Laura Miller has written a typically thoughtful and thought-provoking piece about the sexual abuse by Alice Munro’s second husband of Munro’s daughter.
08-Jul-2024:
I enjoyed this discussion between Colm Tóibín (as Laureate for Irish fiction) with Belinda McKeon, about her first novel Solace (2011), which I happen to have …
07-Jul-2024:
I hadn’t appreciated till now that the Rwanda asylum fiasco is yet another ridiculous consequence of Brexit
07-Jul-2024:
Near Dark, Point Break, Blue Steel, Strange Days: I’m belatedly realizing that these are different movies 🍿. I could have avoided a lot of confusion if someone …
05-Jul-2024:
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has said his party is making progress towards his goal of replacing the Tories as the main opposition to the Tories. …
03-Jul-2024:
Here’s a stimulating discussion by Henry Oliver in The Common Reader of what he calls the modern discourse novel. He criticizes Lauren Oyler and Patricia …
01-Jul-2024:
Yesterday’s Talk about books post was about the poetry of Louis MacNeice. It’s incomplete, I’m afraid, but I thought it best to post it anyway. I’ll revise and …
30-Jun-2024:
Slow movements: Flux and stillness in some poems by Louis MacNeice A discussion, as yet unfinished, of some of Louis MacNeice’s poetry which deals with time and change, flux and stasis.
25-Jun-2024:
Tommie Gorman who, among his many other distinctions, was in my year at school has sadly died
23-Jun-2024:
I’ve just posted on my personal site: Bad poetic taste is better than no taste at all. I’ve always felt that my taste in poetry is regrettably narrow; finally …
23-Jun-2024:
This is a shock: Newpark Academy of Music announces sudden closure. Most of the leading Irish jazz musicians have either taught or been taught there 🎶
19-Jun-2024:
Breaking: 95-year-old man hasn’t died
18-Jun-2024:
… worried that the hoards of teenagers on the lash are going to catch a chill.
It’s about time we stopped hoarding teenagers. Terence Eden, Falsehoods …
18-Jun-2024:
… the 1975, a band that represents everything I enjoy in the abstract and who have never produced one record I’ve actually enjoyed, making them the music …
17-Jun-2024:
Yellowface is sharp and funny but parts of it read like a hot take on the current state of publishing. It’s hard to believe that even such a smart and …
17-Jun-2024:
… so obvious was to it to Shakespeare’s contemporaries that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare that the first speculations that someone else might have written the …
16-Jun-2024:
I bought a copy of Rebecca F Kuang’s Yellowface 📚 to read on the train yesterday. Station bookshop didn’t have the book I particularly wanted. 70 pages in, I’m …
16-Jun-2024:
Just ordered this limited edition CD of Philip Chevron songs from Bandcamp. First not-jazz album I’ve bought since godknowswhen 🎶
16-Jun-2024:
I’ve just posted on Talk about books my discussion of two “music poems”🎶 📖 by Robert Browning, “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” and “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha”. I had …
16-Jun-2024:
Robert Browning’s poetry about music: “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” and “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha” A look at two poems by Robert Browning in which a first-person speaker, an approximate contemporary of the poet’s, addresses and interrogates through his music …
12-Jun-2024:
I started to write a newsletter post about Browning’s “music poetry”, saw that John Lennard (The Poetry Handbook 📚) describes the metre of “A Toccata of …
12-Jun-2024:
Hey, it seems that Françoise Hardy was still alive till just a few days ago. Who knew?
07-Jun-2024:
Here’s Ken Whyte of Sutherland House (a Canadian nonfic publisher) on the Junkification of Amazon. It’s getting worse. Strange to think it’s almost 5 years …
07-Jun-2024:
“This verdict closes the book on a relentless 13-year effort to pin HP’s well-documented ineptitude on Dr Lynch …”
according to Mike Lynch’s lawyers following …
05-Jun-2024:
This is one of the ways that Bookmunch gets on my nerves: in the first sentence of this book review the word “I” appears three times, and it’s the first word of …
04-Jun-2024:
A friend of mine, who’s slightly older than me, told me, “I don’t even buy green bananas anymore.”
Cormac McCarthy, in conversation with the Coen brothers, …
02-Jun-2024:
TFW you’ve just arrived on a web page and are trying to dismiss the popup that immediately appears in the middle of your screen, when another popup pops up in …
01-Jun-2024:
The current Talk about books post is about Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles 📖. I particularly enjoyed writing this one. It didn’t end up where I was …
01-Jun-2024:
Everywoman in Arcadia: Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles Though Hardy presents his heroine as a vivid, precisely drawn individual, she seems at the same time to span historical eras and periods and to bridge social …
01-Jun-2024:
I think the last time I went to the cinema was 2007, when I saw Das Leben der Anderen (with French subtitles) in Toulouse. When I lived near the Dalston Rio I …
30-May-2024:
A little over a year ago, I wrote about 2 short novels by Ian McEwan in which music plays a central role. I’ve finally got around to writing about The Children …
25-May-2024:
Sad to hear that Palle Danielsson has died. I particularly love the CamJazz albums he made with John Taylor (p) and Martin France (d). I wanted to go and see …
23-May-2024:
If it weren’t for this side gig, he’d be back home petting his cats, grading papers, and bird-watching. (He doesn’t really have a lot going on.)
Huh? Has the …
23-May-2024:
Not for the first time I’m thinking about removing Bookmunch from my feed reader. They often have irritating, offputting reviews of books I might want to read. …
22-May-2024:
He had loved Thurber when he was young. He even liked the television show that used Thurber’s drawings, My World and Welcome to It.
That’s from Laura Lippman’s …
19-May-2024:
I’m reading McEwan’s The Children Act for the third time, wanting to write something about his use of music. The phrase “ruin a fine tenor voice for effects …
19-May-2024:
A new post from me in Talk about books. This time I’m looking at some city comedies by Thomas Middleton: A Trick to Catch the Old One and two others. The cruel …
19-May-2024:
The cruel comedy of Thomas Middleton: A Trick to Catch the Old One and other city comedies A look at three “city comedies” by Thomas Middleton, in which he works clever variations on a repeated set of themes, sets up the occasional coup de théâtre and …
18-May-2024:
A link in Julian Girdham’s latest blog post led me indirectly to this earlier one where he writes about the design of poetry textbooks. That in turn reminded me …
15-May-2024:
I reread Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye 📖 a few months ago, having previously read it in the early 90s and remembered only the theme — and that vaguely. It’s just …
15-May-2024:
My sister was driving from France and brought the rest of the books I’d left behind there years ago. I was hoping to be reunited with Wilkie Collins, No Name; …
15-May-2024:
I think it’s time I gave up trying to crosspost to BlueSky and just posted there manually instead. It’s a pity because I like being able to include real links …
15-May-2024:
I unexpectedly came across my old copies of The Invention of Solitude and Moon Palace just now. When Auster died recently, I thought I’d like to read Moon …
15-May-2024:
Apple, why is my “Recents” folder completely empty? And why has a photo I just saved to the “Preview” folder on iCloud not shown up there, or anywhere else that …
13-May-2024:
What blasted idiot thought touchscreens were a good idea? I just wiped some dirt off the screen of my iPad and jumped at least one screen back in the browser …
08-May-2024:
Two contrasting reviews of Caoilinn Hughes’s third novel 📖, at Bookmunch and the Irish Times. The Irish Times one is subscriber only, I’m afraid.
07-May-2024:
I should have known there’d be a word for it: matriphagy. Perfect! Sarah Ditum on form, as usual
05-May-2024:
The latest post from Talk about books is Nothing to be afraid of: Seamus Heaney on the last things of Yeats and Larkin, about Heaney’s 1990 lecture as Oxford …
05-May-2024:
Nothing to be afraid of: Seamus Heaney on the last things of Yeats and Larkin A look at a lecture that Seamus Heaney gave while he was Oxford Professor of Poetry, in which he compared Philip Larkin’s “Aubade” with two poems by W B Yeats, …
05-May-2024:
Brad Mehldau has been playing in a trio with Jorge Rossy again, this time with a bassist who is unfamiliar to me (but Danish!!) Later this month, he’s playing …
05-May-2024:
There are so many reasons why Amazon should be broken up, but this look at its absolutely atrocious business culture and ethics just adds to the pile.
says Ian …
04-May-2024:
I enjoyed this evisceration of Stanley Kubrick. To be fair to Kubrick, I haven’t seen very many of his films. I remember reading a (favourable) review of Barry …
04-May-2024:
I love the Brad Mehldau Trio’s version of “Day Is Done” (which I’m listening to at the moment). I wonder what Nick Drake would have made of it 🎶 🎹
04-May-2024:
You have a choice between somebody who without a doubt, and has said so, will impose a vengeful tyranny, and another person who wouldn’t …
says Margaret …
03-May-2024:
Doctor Who actors ranked. I can’t believe Matt Smith came … um, where he did. Before Capaldi. And Eccleston. Preposterous.
02-May-2024:
Contingency, as an aesthetic given, tends to undermine meaning from the ground up. Where meaning is absent, dead language creeps in.
Kevin Power has …
02-May-2024:
Goodbye Blackberry Way … 🎶 🎹Richard Tandy, ELO keyboardist, dies aged 76
01-May-2024:
Four years ago, I said I wanted to read Rachel Donohue’s The Temple House Vanishing 📚, on the basis of a piece by her in the Irish Times, evoking 1990s Dublin. …
01-May-2024:
Sorry, it’s my fault again. I was just thinking about Auster this morning (which is not something I do very often). I’ll try to be more careful from now on.
29-Apr-2024:
One of the things that irritates me about Substack is that their RSS feeds don’t include links to other Substack users’ profiles, leaving gaps in the text …
29-Apr-2024:
‘Anxiety is the price we pay for the ability to imagine the future.’
— NYU neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux
Quoted by John Naughton. Hmm. I can’t imagine the …
27-Apr-2024:
Just posted on my personal site, “Nothing human”: A recent article in Vox argues that the Netflix adaptation of Liu’s The Three-Body Problem poses three …
25-Apr-2024:
Having raved about Caoilinn Hughes’s short stories, I found her first two novels less satisfying. This third one sounds more like it — I hope 📖
23-Apr-2024:
Helen Mirren is great, of course, but really unimaginative casting for The Thursday Murder Club 🍿 Oh well, I probably wouldn’t have watched it anyway.
21-Apr-2024:
The latest post from Talk about books is Flight from Paradise: Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown, about his Kashmir novel from 2005 📖
21-Apr-2024:
[Adam] Zeman’s research suggests that people with hyperphantasia enjoy especially rich autobiographical memories.
Hyperphantasia and the quest to understand …
21-Apr-2024:
Flight from paradise: Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown Salman Rushdie’s 2005 novel, Shalimar the Clown, is about Kashmir, the conflict between India and Pakistan over that region and the entanglement of public and …
21-Apr-2024:
I’ve finally read The Mill on the Floss, after two half-hearted attempts when I was much younger. It took me 9 days: Eliot is not a quick read. I’d read almost …
20-Apr-2024:
For a while now, at the back of my mind, I’ve been vaguely, distractedly perplexed that the Dublin Review of Books has been publishing so little material and so …
19-Apr-2024:
TFW you try to extend the selection of some text but iOS scrolls the page instead! 😡
14-Apr-2024:
I’ve been trying to write a response to this piece in Vox by Sigal Samuel, “3 Body Problem’s most mind-bending question isn’t about aliens”. I’m not happy with …
14-Apr-2024:
I read Jane Harper’s The Dry a few weeks ago and enjoyed it thoroughly; but yesterday I found another book of hers, The Lost Man on special offer (€5 for a new …
11-Apr-2024:
Last summer, my brain’s internal radio was alternating Tommy Steele’s “Little White Bull” and the musichall tune “Down at the Old Bull and Bush”. I thought I …
11-Apr-2024:
I hate earworms, but can’t get rid of them. For weeks now, I have been waking up with Moore’s “She Is Far from the Land”🎶 playing in my head, and I have no idea …
07-Apr-2024:
The latest Talk about books is Incorrigibly plural: Lucy Caldwell, ed. Being Various. The 6th Faber anthology of “New Irish short stories”📖 includes 24 stories. …
07-Apr-2024:
Incorrigibly plural: Lucy Caldwell, ed. Being Various The sixth anthology in Faber’s series of “New Irish short stories” contains 24 stories, ranging across a variety of themes and styles. I discuss four of my …
06-Apr-2024:
This Irish Times headline quotes somebody as saying that Simon Harris used to turn up in suits three times too big for him. If he wore suits three sizes too big …
02-Apr-2024:
I think this may be all my fault. I just looked up Trevor Griffiths on Wikipedia and (having gone down a rabbit hole) elsewhere a few days ago, in part to see …
31-Mar-2024:
Latest post on my own site: Print-on-demand? Amazon has been sending out print-on-demand copies of books when they run out of traditionally printed regular …
31-Mar-2024:
Fears that AI poses some kind of existential threat are highly effective misdirection. AI isn’t going to achieve “world domination”™️. The humans running the …
29-Mar-2024:
I liked Dervla McTiernan’s first three novels and found the fourth readable if unsatisfactory in some respects. But, on the basis of her piece in Crime Reads …
27-Mar-2024:
I bought a copy of Tana French’s The Wych Elm about 4½ years ago but have only now got around to reading it. It’s devastating, even if you find the narrator …
25-Mar-2024:
Maybe it’s actually a good review: clearly letting me know that this book is not for me!
25-Mar-2024:
Here’s an extremely irritating book review. I’ve read just 2 of Nicole Flattery’s short stories and didn’t like them. I suspected she might be a better novelist …
24-Mar-2024:
Here’s yet another good reason not to buy books from Amazon 📚
20-Mar-2024:
The new Talk about books post (on time, for the first time in ages) looks at Caroline O’Donoghue’s second novel for adults, Scenes of a Graphic Nature 📖. A …
20-Mar-2024:
Caroline O’Donoghue, Scenes of a Graphic Nature The second of Caroline O’Donoghue’s 3 novels for adults features a filmmaker in her late 20s who visits her father’s birthplace on a small County Kerry island …
18-Mar-2024:
Flying six people to space is cheaper than sending an asylum seeker to Rwanda, an MP has said.
Cheaper to send people into space than to Rwanda, MPs hear …
18-Mar-2024:
I’ve just deleted my Substack account, something I’ve been thinking about for a while. That means cancelling my one paid subscription. The unpaid ones I can …
17-Mar-2024:
I don’t see how you could spend even an hour in Dublin and not see the ruinous impact of the tech industry. We sold the city to these companies and made it …
17-Mar-2024:
My iPhone 12 Mini’s small screen means that I use Safari’s reader view a lot. But the way it leaves out author names/bylines is really frustrating. I know the …
17-Mar-2024:
So it was easy for me to be the titular lead director.
Hey, a rare sighting of “titular” used in the old-fashioned (IMO “correct”) sense. These days, people …
16-Mar-2024:
I regularly mix up names that aren’t at all alike, so you can imagine how confused I was, having seen posters around Westport for a concert by Cara Dillon, I …
16-Mar-2024:
I really wanted the Autonomy fiasco to be HP’s fault, not Lynch’s. Of course, it’s possible for both things to be true: even if Lynch inflated the value, it …
12-Mar-2024:
My phone service provider regularly sends me emails urging me to “go 5G”, though there’s no 5G coverage in this area. Even 4G is a bit spotty since the storms …
10-Mar-2024:
Late again, here’s the most recent post from Talk about books, Taking oneself seriously: The three novels of Candia McWilliam. Two years ago, I wrote about her …
10-Mar-2024:
Taking oneself seriously: The three novels of Candia McWilliam Between 1987 and 1994, Candia McWilliam published 3 novels, none of them very long, which were critically very well received and won prizes. A collection of …
07-Mar-2024:
I just noticed that someone whose Substack Notes I follow (I get their newsletter by RSS) has posted several Notes that I hadn’t seen, but would have liked to. …
06-Mar-2024:
I got 8 out of 12 and it said “in the middle of your flop era”, but I thought 8/12 was good, actually. I was pleased with my performance; it wan’t bad at all. …
05-Mar-2024:
Sad to hear that Edward Bond has died, though at least he had a long life. I think I only ever saw one of his plays — The Sea 🎭 — in performance, though I saw …
28-Feb-2024:
Substack now has direct messages. It’s not a feature I’m likely to use very much (I sent maybe one every two years on Twitter) but we’ll see.
27-Feb-2024:
This year’s choice for One Dublin, One Book is Louise Nealon’s Snowflake 📖. The idea is that as many people as possible should read it during April. I’ve …
25-Feb-2024:
Bernard Kops is dead. He was 97, but it’s still sad. I fondly remember a playwriting workshop he led at the CityLit, early 1990s, and I went with my mother (who …
25-Feb-2024:
I just posted the latest Talk about books. It looks at philosophical materialism in Paradise Lost: Material particulars: Spirit and matter in Milton’s Paradise …
25-Feb-2024:
Material particulars: Spirit and matter in Milton’s Paradise Lost Paradise Lost reveals Milton’s philosophical materialism, while passing over the heretical beliefs which in part flow from it.
23-Feb-2024:
Unfortunate BP employee gets fired because she wasn’t sufficiently suspicious of her husband: Insider trading.
22-Feb-2024:
I’m always complaining about Google’s search results. It’s great for one thing, though: identifying half-remembered snippets of poetry. Last night, something I …
20-Feb-2024:
Wayne Robins attempts to shape his 7-month-old grandson’s musical tastes and reminisces about “smoking a j and knocking back a bottle of Thunderbird with Mister …
19-Feb-2024:
The Critic magazine has a good article on Josephine Tey, two of whose novels have been reissued in Penguin’s Crime & Espionage series. I read and enjoyed …
17-Feb-2024:
I’m again thinking about deleting my Substack account. I moved my newsletter >2 years ago, and I’m still on Substack only for the Notes, which I thought …
17-Feb-2024:
I use Safari Reader View a lot, particularly on my phone. One thing that I find annoying is that it (often?) doesn’t display the author’s byline. I was …
13-Feb-2024:
I’ve updated my Talk about books post about William Empson’s reading of Joyce’s Ulysses from Mar 2021 to include page references from the Penguin …
13-Feb-2024:
My original Talk about books post in July 2022 about Ted Chiang’s novella/long short story, “Anxiety is the dizzyness of freedom” had no page references because …
11-Feb-2024:
John Newell, a County Down man … infiltrated the United Irishmen rebel group in 1796 and helped to imprison 200 members. Newell was paid £2,000 by the …
11-Feb-2024:
I’ve just posted in Talk about books: a second visit to Kate Atkinson’s series about an intermittently retired private investigator, looking in particular at …
11-Feb-2024:
Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series revisited A second look at Kate Atkinson’s series about an intermittently retired private investigator, looking in particular at the first book, Case Histories, which I …
09-Feb-2024:
Hard to believe it’s 25 years since the Pinochet appeals and Lord Hoffman’s extraordinary mistake. Joshua Rozenberg has an excellent recap. As usual, I’m …
30-Jan-2024:
When you have a useful thing worth money and regularly leave it outdoors, ingenuity and an angle grinder will come for you in the end. You have to see yourself …
28-Jan-2024:
The latest Talk about books post is about Bernard MacLaverty’s short stories in Blank Pages and other stories (2021). The vulnerabilities and indignities of age …
28-Jan-2024:
Jagged and straight: Bernard MacLaverty, Blank Pages and other stories MacLaverty’s sixth book of short stories, the first for fifteen years, features many aging or elderly characters who are vulnerable to failing health and …
27-Jan-2024:
Earlier this week I was surprised to learn that Ivor Browne had, until just a few days ago, still been alive. I hadn’t heard anything about him for decades. …
23-Jan-2024:
Has Substack changed the way it handles link previews? I stopped including Twitter card meta tags in my blog posts about a year ago. For a while I replaced them …
23-Jan-2024:
My blog hasn’t been updating for the past few days. I just want to see if a new post will dislodge it.
20-Jan-2024:
Hi @help @manton There’s something strange going on with my blog. The log is full of lines like this
Publish: Already queued, scheduling +30 seconds
and it …
18-Jan-2024:
I think I might disable crossposting from Micro.blog to BlueSky (the only place I have it enabled) because more often than not, once I’ve posted something on …
18-Jan-2024:
In the long run, student plagiarists are mostly harming themselves, and so we should discourage them from plagiarism for the same reason that we discourage them …
14-Jan-2024:
Problems with the RSS for yesterday’s Talk about books
My apologies to everybody who follows my newsletter, Talk about books, by RSS. The RSS for yesterday’s post, about Robert Browning’s poem, “My Last Duchess” …
13-Jan-2024:
Here is the first Talk about books post of 2024. “I choose Never to stoop”: Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess”. The monologue is more effective as drama if we …
13-Jan-2024:
“I choose Never to stoop”: Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess” Robert Browning’s monologue is more effective as drama if we don’t assume (a) that the subject of the painting is necessarily the Duke’s first wife, as well as …
11-Jan-2024:
SEC Twitter account hacked; Twitter says two-factor authentication wasn’t enabled. Is it legal for Twitter to make it public whether 2FA is enabled on an …
04-Jan-2024:
Existential crises are also a recent phenomenon, and involve a use of the word “existential” you won’t find in any dictionary. It … means “actually existing”. …
01-Jan-2024:
… the kinds of book I am most likely to abandon are history and theology; the kinds I am least likely to abandon are novels and biographies.
writes Alan …
31-Dec-2023:
The last Talk about books post of 2023 is about Emma Healey’s two novels, 📖Elizabeth Is Missing (2014) and Whistle in the Dark (2018). Happy New Year, all. The …
31-Dec-2023:
Emma Healey, Elizabeth Is Missing and Whistle in the Dark Emma Healey’s two novels (to date) are quite different from each other but share some ideas and themes. Both focus on the relationship between sisters, and both …
30-Dec-2023:
Bandcamp has a previously unreleased live album by Mads Vinding, recorded 2018, with Dado Moroni on piano 🎹. I’m very tempted, except for a 9-minute version of …
29-Dec-2023:
Mince, Delors! Jacques Delors destroyed the European left. Actually, I don’t agree with much of this analysis but I think it’s worth reading.
27-Dec-2023:
… although not an especially good cook, Eve is always ready with sage advice about the arts of the kitchen. One of her more irritating sayings is “you can’t …
22-Dec-2023:
I just read the first 5 instalments of Luke Jennings’s Killing Eve: Resurrection on Substack. I hadn’t read his original books📚 or watched the tv series but …
20-Dec-2023:
I’ve never liked bagels …
writes John Naughton. I must say the concept of “liking bagels” caused me a certain amount of cognitive dissonance when I read that. …
18-Dec-2023:
It looks as if Bluesky might where several of the people I used to enjoy following on Twitter have ended up. People like John Self for example.
18-Dec-2023:
I was wondering how it was that I’d never heard of the Irish film November Afternoon 🍿 till I remembered that in 1996 I’d been living in London for 9 years, …
18-Dec-2023:
Now Threads has come to the EU I’m reminded that I don’t want an Instagram account or anything from Meta. Maybe it’s time to try Bluesky instead. If some kind …
17-Dec-2023:
The new Talk about books post is about A Stranger with a Bag, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s collection of thirteen stories includes several which feature …
17-Dec-2023:
Stranger still: Sylvia Townsend Warner, A Stranger with a Bag and Other Stories Sylvia Townsend Warner’s collection of thirteen stories includes several which feature “strangers”, people who are in some sense out of place. Many of the …
14-Dec-2023:
It’s as if the show is saying, “Yes, yes, on the one hand the Doctor always changes, but on the other hand he is also always David Tennant and he is also always …
10-Dec-2023:
Ben Sixsmith in The Critic on The sad reign of Ian Hislop. I remember remarking to someone in 1995 or thereabouts that HIGNFY was my favourite tv programme (I …
10-Dec-2023:
I get so fed up reading the phrase “show, don’t tell”. It’s not that I disagree with the principle, not at all (within reason), but surely there’s something …
10-Dec-2023:
Did William Empson have ADHD or something like it? Spoiler: I’m not able to reach a conclusion, sorry. But if he did have ADHD it would be interesting, because …
09-Dec-2023:
People often complain about Substack for various reasons but there’s a lot of good stuff on there. (One of these days, I’m going to post a list of the feeds I …
07-Dec-2023:
I listened to several old episodes of BBC Radio 4’s Open Book last night, including an interview with Sarah Hall on the publication of her novel Burntcoat …
06-Dec-2023:
Signal is fading, if this is right. I’ve found myself increasingly using regular SMS. I have an iPhone 12 Mini, most of my friends and family prefer Android and …
04-Dec-2023:
I’m not enjoying Substack Notes so I thought about deleting my Substack account entirely, to avoid the temptation to use Notes. But I have paid subscriptions to …
04-Dec-2023:
George Boole was the model for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty — true or false?
03-Dec-2023:
Just posted on Talk about books, a discussion of three novels by Jane Austen: Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion 📖
03-Dec-2023:
Land and marriage: Three novels by Jane Austen Jane Austen’s irony includes a kind of “double vision” which enables her to consider simultaneously “The economic basis of society” (W H Auden) and the …
29-Nov-2023:
Tasers and water cannon? That would be a very effective combination. Tasers to be given to Public Order Unit and water cannons sought
28-Nov-2023:
Every now and then, I find myself wanting to write a post about the unfulfilled promises of technology. Then I remember that I already wrote it, more than 3 …
26-Nov-2023:
I want to go for a walk but I don’t want to go for a walk around here (boring), it’s too wet to take the bike out and the Sunday bus timetable is such that I …
26-Nov-2023:
The iOS Weather app tells me that it’s not going to rain today until 8 pm but a look out the window tells me that it’s raining now. I wonder which I should …
25-Nov-2023:
Funny to realize that the Eblana’s existence has been forgotten and that it’s now part of “hidden Dublin”. I saw the hilarious production of Joe Orton’s Loot🎭 …
24-Nov-2023:
The people I buy my coffee from keep sending me emails that look like this. I think there are supposed to be various offers between the links styled as buttons …
23-Nov-2023:
Cydney Hayes sees a “vibe shift” on Substack since the introduction of Notes: The elite capture of Substack. I must say I haven’t been finding it enjoyable or …
23-Nov-2023:
“You don’t always have to stay in your lane. But try not to drive completely off the road into a damn flute store!”
Ah, so “stay in your lane” is a driving …
22-Nov-2023:
Because of my age I qualified for free bus and train travel a few months ago. Now, I regularly catch myself singing the beginning of Jethro Tull’s “Doctor …
20-Nov-2023:
When the Haughey payments became public knowledge, some joker commented “Ben there. Dunne that. Bought the Taoiseach.” 🤣
Ben Dunne dead at 74
19-Nov-2023:
This is the 78th post in Talk about books, marking the end of its 3rd year. Unfortunately, the post isn’t one of my best: I start by saying I don’t know the …
19-Nov-2023:
The last word or the first claim: Notes on some of Seamus Heaney’s poetry I don’t know the poetry of Seamus Heaney (the tenth anniversary of whose death was earlier this year) as well as I ought to, and in this post I manage to prove …
17-Nov-2023:
A S Byatt has died, aged 87. I liked some of her novels (Possession, Still Life) very much and disliked others (The Biographer’s Tale 📚, Babel Tower) almost as …
17-Nov-2023:
When they say, “This call may be recorded for monitoring and training purposes”, I say, “Thank you!”, and click the record button.
Quentin Stafford-Fraser
14-Nov-2023:
I always think that Gary Oldman looks even less like “a bullfrog in a sou’wester” than Alec Guinness did!
09-Nov-2023:
Here’s a fascinating and amusing long piece about aggressive literary agent Andrew Wylie, aka “the Jackal”, who temporarily broke up the friendship of Julian …
08-Nov-2023:
Here’s Salman Rushdie on the usefulness of fable and the elusiveness of peace
06-Nov-2023:
Noah Smith has been taking a penetrating look at what’s going on in the Irish economy and has unearthed a few surprising facts: How Ireland got so rich
Ireland …
05-Nov-2023:
I’d never seen Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation🍿 but read something recently about its 20th anniversary and decided it was time. I watched first 15 minutes …
01-Nov-2023:
I’ve just posted in Talk about books about Daphne du Maurier’s collection of “long” short stories, Don’t Look Now and other stories 📖
01-Nov-2023:
Daphne du Maurier, Don’t Look Now and other stories This collection of 5 “long” short stories displays du Maurier’s versatility but without giving the impression that it’s a deliberate showcase or sampler. One …
29-Oct-2023:
For some reason (?!) I’ve been watching random episodes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip this morning. I really don’t like Aaron Sorkin’s writing very much but …
29-Oct-2023:
I have Safari on my phone set up to load Wikipedia pages in Reader View automatically. But I can’t expand the headings in Reader View!
28-Oct-2023:
I bought an old DVD in a secondhand shop yesterday, to rip the movie for my iPad. As I was paying (€1), the woman said “It’s 2 for the price of 1”. I didn’t …
25-Oct-2023:
When Substack introduced Notes, I said I didn’t know whether I needed a Twitter alternative but that Notes might be it. Starting to think that I really don’t …
22-Oct-2023:
The latest post from Talk about books, even later than usual (which is becoming the norm when I’m writing about Salman Rushdie) narrowly avoids discussing in …
22-Oct-2023:
Shifting ground: Salman Rushdie, The Ground beneath Her Feet Salman Rushdie’s 1999 novel marks a change of direction in his fiction, though I’m not yet sure which way it leaves him pointing. He jokes about …
20-Oct-2023:
… Google’s defense, which is that it’s not Google’s access to more data that keeps Google leagues ahead of competitors in search, it’s “brilliant people, …
19-Oct-2023:
There’s a little book festival in Westport this weekend. I’m a bit tempted by the Séamus Heaney event but maybe the €25 charge would be better spent on a book …
18-Oct-2023:
I got the previous Talk about books post out on time (i.e. on the Wednesday) for the first time in several months. But already I’m slipping again. Today I’m …
17-Oct-2023:
I just looked up “negative space” because I couldn’t figure out intuitively what it might mean, and now I’m really puzzled. How is this different from positive …
16-Oct-2023:
Safari on my iPhone keeps loading completely blank pages — not even a “can’t find server” message — for every page I try to visit. I’ve never seen this …
15-Oct-2023:
The biographer’s predicament:
out to be definitive, he got cornered into granting copy approval before being scooped by someone whose story it actually was. …
14-Oct-2023:
Here’s Richard Williams’s typically brilliant post on The Isleys, whose mainstay, Rudolph, has died, aged 84 🎶
09-Oct-2023:
Stuart Jeffries has a go at Nicholas Lyndhurst for the script of a daft sitcom he had a supporting role in as a young actor 45 years ago. Incisive journalism.
08-Oct-2023:
Apparently, Sam Bankman-Fried balked at paying Trump $5bn to agree not to run for the Presidency again. But maybe we could crowdfund it?
07-Oct-2023:
The Akoustic Band has till recently been my least favourite of Chick Corea’s piano-led 🎹 trios, but I bought their Live album a few months ago and it’s been …
07-Oct-2023:
Apparently, the south side of Dublin gets more rain than the north side, which is in the lee of Howth Hill. Judging by where they seem to want to live, I don’t …
06-Oct-2023:
I’ve started to read Mansfield Park 📖, a Jane Austen novel that I haven’t read before. I might write about it, Emma and Persuasion (both of which I have read, …
04-Oct-2023:
I just posted this from Talk about books: Becoming Amazons: Lisa Lutz, The Swallows 📖. The book is an unusual — but very effective — combination of serious, …
04-Oct-2023:
Becoming Amazons: Lisa Lutz, The Swallows Lisa Lutz’s novel, The Swallows (2019) successfully performs a difficult balancing act. The theme is deadly serious — sexual exploitation and abuse — while the …
04-Oct-2023:
Ah, the problem seems to be specifically with Wordpress sites.
04-Oct-2023:
Is Cloudflare or some similar service down this morning? Many sites (e.g The Overspill) aren’t loading at all, whereas many others are loading normally 🤷♂️
03-Oct-2023:
Here’s an absorbing “long read” about Michael Lewis (oh, and somebody named Sam Bankman-Fried): The Insider
03-Oct-2023:
“MX”, the subject of the first case study of acquired aphantasia, could give detailed descriptions of scenes and landmarks around his native Edinburgh: “I can …
02-Oct-2023:
I’ve just finished reading David Garnett’s 📖 The Grasshoppers Come (1931), a novella in which a crashed pilot in the Gobi desert survives by eating locusts. …
02-Oct-2023:
I picked up a hardback copy of Chris Power’s collection of short stories, Mothers (2018) 📖 in good condition in a secondhand shop today, so I’m feeling quite …
30-Sep-2023:
I don’t like the sound of this. Hope I’m wrong. Songtradr acquires Bandcamp 🎶
26-Sep-2023:
“Background music” is noise pollution. I’m sitting in a coffee shop in a shopping centre while waiting for my bus,and making no progress with the book I’m …
23-Sep-2023:
Latest from Talk about books: Out of series: Liz Nugent, Unravelling Oliver and Lying in Wait 📖
Liz Nugent’s first two novels combine familiar, naturalistically …
23-Sep-2023:
Out of series: Liz Nugent, Unravelling Oliver (2014) and Lying in Wait (2016) Liz Nugent’s first two novels combine familiar, naturalistically described settings with melodramatic action and motivations that are shockingly twisted. The …
23-Sep-2023:
I’ve just been reading Ethan Iverson’s remarks about William Friedkin’s films, including Jade (1995). About Jade: I used to think David Caruso was pretty good, …
22-Sep-2023:
The up-arrow on my 2019 MacBook Air (butterfly keyboard) no longer works. Usually, that’s no problem but today I needed to search through Terminal history for a …
22-Sep-2023:
This priceless “mute interview” with Samuel Beckett following his Nobel prize win (1969) looks as if he directed it himself. Sorry it’s on Facebook. (I was able …
21-Sep-2023:
Booker shortlist dominated by Pauls 📖
21-Sep-2023:
If this lawsuit makes US copyright law stricter against AI, all it would do is make companies hesitant to develop and innovate in their products.
He says that …
17-Sep-2023:
John Marshall, drummer with Soft Machine has died. I have two albums he made for ECM with Arild Andersen (b) and Vassilis Tsabropoulos (p). I’m going to listen …
17-Sep-2023:
And this what pushed the post about Bookshop.org off the front page: Tracking my reading. Yet again, I’m giving up the idea of keeping track of the books I …
17-Sep-2023:
This post from the start of this year has just dropped off the end of the front page of my personal site, so I thought I’d give it a bit of a boost, trying to …
15-Sep-2023:
What we think of as vanilla—sweet, bland—is a lie. Real vanilla rather than synthetic vanillan can taste “dark-sweet, of smoke and cherries; or earthy as …
14-Sep-2023:
I’ve just reread Candia McWilliam’s A Little Stranger 📖. I love these old Picador paperbacks, they remind me of how I felt back in the late 80s. I realized I’ve …
14-Sep-2023:
In Normal People 📖, the fictional Connell cast his first vote in a general election for Declan Bree (as did I, 30-odd years earlier). Now, the veteran Cllr Bree …
12-Sep-2023:
I read John McGahern’s novel Amongst Women 📖 in 1991 or 1992, and I couldn’t understand the praise it had attracted. To me it seemed just another tale about …
12-Sep-2023:
What’s the point of having a nuclear arsenal if you can’t use it to bluff? Elon Musk let Russia scare him — The Artlantic
10-Sep-2023:
The latest post from Talk about books is about Wilkie Collins’s 1875 novel, The Law and the Lady 📖. Valeria Woodville is advised by many wise and well-meaning …
10-Sep-2023:
Hi @help, the status of my current newsletter is that it’s “scheduled to go in -9 minutes” (i.e. 9 minutes ago). It seems to be stuck. Your help …
10-Sep-2023:
A double standard: Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady Valeria Woodville is advised by many wise and well-meaning people that to investigate her new husband’s hidden past can result only in misery and despair. Her …
10-Sep-2023:
Échappé belle
I spent several hours yesterday writing 1,300 words for my newsletter. I write in Tot, which syncs between Mac and iPad (and in principle iPhone) via iCloud. …
08-Sep-2023:
I just deleted 32 feeds from my feed reader (NetNewsWire) and subscribed to them in Substack app instead. As I said yesterday, I’m using the app regularly for …
07-Sep-2023:
I’ve been using the Substack app (on iPhone) and website (on Mac and iPad) daily because Notes. I’m now thinking that, since I’m using the app/site anyway, …
03-Sep-2023:
After tinkering with it occasionally over 5 years, I’ve finally abandoned my short story “Purpose of Amendment” (the first part of 3 is still up). I was really …
02-Sep-2023:
I do think no story has ever been read properly unless it’s read twice.
Claire Keegan 📖
02-Sep-2023:
When I was repatriating my books from France earlier this year, this is one that I packed. Now I’m wondering what I was thinking when I made space for a bulky …
01-Sep-2023:
Surely this should be more widely known. The publisher George Weidenfeld and the writer Cyril Connolly named each other as corespondents in successive divorce …
30-Aug-2023:
… a robot once used in an underwater search for a hydrogen bomb off the coast of Spain has been called in as backup.
Whaaaat? Submarine trapped on seabed, 1973
30-Aug-2023:
The NetPositive browser had no support for either CSS or JavaScript. It was fast and light and I thought it was beautiful. In those days, the conventional …
27-Aug-2023:
I just posted this on my own site: Substack Notes: a substitute for Twitter?
27-Aug-2023:
I think I’m going to stop adding OG tags to posts on my personal site. It annoys me to have to paste in the same text twice for title, description etc.
26-Aug-2023:
Naomi Klein has a Rick Springfield problem, or something more serious. Naomi Klein on following her “doppelgänger” down the conspiracy rabbit hole
26-Aug-2023:
Poetic imagery: William Empson and the visual imagination in the criticism of poetry William Empson said that he never formed visual mental images while he read or thought. I’ve no doubt that aphantasia affects the ways one reads and reacts to …
23-Aug-2023:
I was telling my doctor what aphantasia is (because I thought not being able to visualize might be making it harder for me to deal with anxiety) and she seemed …
22-Aug-2023:
I hate JSTOR. It won’t accept password from Keychain, won’t let me size pages so that the text is legible (and yes, I am wearing my glasses) and now won’t let …
21-Aug-2023:
Finished A S Byatt, Sugar and other stories 📚. This was Byatt’s first short story collection. It’s very uneven. One story, about a 63-year-old woman living in …
20-Aug-2023:
If you like Susanna Clarke’s novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell 📚, I recommend this post by Adam Roberts. It’s long (almost 9,000 words) and well argued, …
20-Aug-2023:
I just posted this on my personal site: Book reviews, plot summaries and other ways of writing about books. It’s a response to Henry Oliver’s recent post Ban …
19-Aug-2023:
Here’s more Tom Gauld // @odd
15-Aug-2023:
Do not say that your grandmother used to read to you as a boy, unless your grandmother really was a boy, in which case you’ve thrown away a better opening. …
15-Aug-2023:
Substack has brought back the former feature by which you could follow somebody’s Notes without also signing up for their emails. The new implementation is …
13-Aug-2023:
The latest Talk about books post is about Salman Rushdie’s 1995 novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh 📖. One character is a brutally unflattering portrait of a real-life …
13-Aug-2023:
“What, not one hit?” Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh Rushdie’s fifth novel for adults, his next after The Satanic Verses, features one character who is a brutally unflattering caricature of a real-life Hindu …
11-Aug-2023:
With the books and CDs that I brought back from France, I found some DVDs that I seem never to have ripped, including 2 from Chick Corea’s Rendezvous in New …
11-Aug-2023:
I’ve often seen this album on download or streaming sites credited to “AC Trio, feat. Anders Christensen”. It’s another example of these sites spreading bad …
10-Aug-2023:
47 years on, Wayne Robins remains unimpressed by The Last Walz. I never saw Scorsese’s film, but in 1978 I shared a flat with a guy who had the soundtrack …
09-Aug-2023:
Reddit won, it says here. A battle or the war?
07-Aug-2023:
When I saw The French Connection, I was too young to appreciate it. Years later, I was blown away by To Live and Die in LA. But there’s still no way I’m going …
07-Aug-2023:
Coincidentally Mulk Raj Anand has turned up in two very different books that I’ve been alternating. One is fiction, the other biogaphy: Salman Rushdie’s The …
07-Aug-2023:
The rise of “mate” mortgages. Everything old is new again, eh? It reminds me of the mid 80s, when the soaring cost of housing brought about the messy end of a …
07-Aug-2023:
I was just reminded of the former existence of Questia, which I had completely forgotten about. I never found it that useful and hadn’t used it since … when? …
06-Aug-2023:
I hadn’t logged in to Artifact for several weeks and when I did it wanted me to begin the whole personalization process all over again! I had been having my …
05-Aug-2023:
I like these new covers for Ian McEwan’s novels from Vintage. (I like some more than others, naturally.)
04-Aug-2023:
In @scottmclemore@mastodon.online ’s newsletter, The Interval, he writes about this summer’s Umbria Jazz, where he saw 🎹 Stefano Bollani and Enrico Pieranunzi. …
04-Aug-2023:
In my household, this phenomenon is known as “boyfriend recall,” a highly developed survival technique.
Helen Lewis. I hate to admit that it has served me …
03-Aug-2023:
Carl Davis, who wrote (among many other things) the music for the BBC miniseries Oppenheimer, has died, aged 86 🎶
01-Aug-2023:
Newts threaten Boris Johnson’s plan to build swimming pool. This sounds very like the revenge of Ken Livingstone.
01-Aug-2023:
Eight books about friendships with wealth disparities📖. And not one of them by Sally Rooney!
30-Jul-2023:
Here’s my first post for some time about SDAM and aphantasia: Sex, SDAM and aphantasia. I tried before to write about how aphantasia affects sex, but I wasn’t …
30-Jul-2023:
The first thing I listen to almost every morning now is Esbjörn Svensson’s very posthumous solo piano album. I was a bit meh about it on first hearing but I’ve …
29-Jul-2023:
Richard Pine, whom coincidentally I mentioned in yesterday’s Talk about books post, writes in The Irish Times about the devastation caused by fires in Corfu.
… …
29-Jul-2023:
Here’s something I never expected to say: there’s a new Shakti album out 🎶. I’m strangely unmoved; I think they may have missed their moment as far as I’m …
29-Jul-2023:
Anyone can condemn Ann Coulter’s latest book, but pointing out the flaws in a feminist or anti-racist book, or a novel by a Black female author, establishes the …
29-Jul-2023:
Suspended: John Lennard, The Poetry Handbook 📚. I found the particular passage I was looking for — in the Introduction. I’m not going to read the rest straight …
28-Jul-2023:
Finished R F Foster, The Irish Story 📚. I started to read this for the essays on W B Yeats — I’ve found that Roy Foster, a historian rather than a literary …
28-Jul-2023:
The current Talk about books is about Notes to Self (2018), Emilie Pine’s extraordinary collection of personal essays. It deals with having an alcoholic parent, …
28-Jul-2023:
“I never call it a memoir”: Mind and body in Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self Emilie Pine’s extraordinary collection of personal essays deals with having an alcoholic parent, childlessness and miscarriage, the body, perceived failure, …
27-Jul-2023:
Soak, lad, wee maid, It.
26-Jul-2023:
Google makes me feel stupid, as if it’s my own fault I can’t frame a query in a way that’s impossible for it to misinterpret. I’m increasingly thinking of the …
22-Jul-2023:
Finished Caroline O’Donoghue, Scenes of a Graphic Nature 📚. Definitely going to reread this soon. I thoroughly enjoyed it, though there were places where it …
22-Jul-2023:
Curious: a review of Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait 📚 that doesn’t mention Browning or “My Last Duchess”
21-Jul-2023:
“If I’m thinking: ‘Is it good?’ it’s not good. If it’s great, you can’t stop thinking about it.”
Felicity Blunt, literary agent
16-Jul-2023:
Here’s a thought-provoking piece in The Observer about the vital function performed by small, independent publishers in the UK, since the consolidated …
15-Jul-2023:
I used to have Wikipedia automatically open in Reader View, because the font was so small and the lines of text so long. Then they changed it to be more legible …
15-Jul-2023:
I posted the latest Talk about books yesterday morning, with the title “Andrew Marvell’s objects”. It looks at the poet’s use of an unusual grammatical device …
15-Jul-2023:
In a few days I’ll be getting new reading glasses which I hope will improve my concentration and prevent me from getting so tired. But I’m keeping my old …
14-Jul-2023:
Andrew Marvell’s objects A look at Andrew Marvell’s use of an unusual grammatical device in which a single verb has two objects, one abstract, one concrete (or in one case, one human, …
09-Jul-2023:
Well, it has taken me 7 years, but I’ve finally grasped the purpose of Brexit. It’s so that people in the UK can have Threads, even though Threads is not …
09-Jul-2023:
The bloody iPad is refusing to join iPhone hotspot again! iPhone keeps adding blank space to the end of the password. I’m never again going to own more than one …
09-Jul-2023:
I don’t listen to any podcast regularly, but was glad to find Caroline O’Donoghue’s Sentimental Garbage while searching for a discussion of O’Donoghue’s 2nd …
08-Jul-2023:
Crooked Timber is 20 years old and several founders and contributors have been marking the occasion with posts like this one. Here’s to many more years to come: …
08-Jul-2023:
Abdullah Ibrahim is playing in the NCH (Dublin) on Thursday, in trio. I’m not going to be able to get to it (didn’t find out in time), but I’m OK with that. I …
08-Jul-2023:
What the heck is wrong with Google? I put a phrase in quotation marks and it shows me variants of that phrase in preference to the exact words; I precede a word …
06-Jul-2023:
“Aviophobia” means fear of flying, apparently. I saw the word and immediately assumed it meant fear of birds. Overdosing on du Maurier, perhaps.
05-Jul-2023:
Finished Eliza Clark, Boy Parts 📚. I liked this more than I was afraid I might, going by the reviews and comments online. And I’m glad I didn’t know beforehand …
04-Jul-2023:
I just spent 45 minutes trying to get iPad to connect to iPhone as wireless hotspot, something it’s been doing almost every day for 2 years. The iPhone password …
02-Jul-2023:
I’m reading R F Foster, The Irish Story 📚. I’d intended to read only the essays on W B Yeats, at least for now, but I’ve got caught up and I’ll probably read …
01-Jul-2023:
I don’t think this could have happened in Ireland without the women’s movement, without women who had known oppression wanting their gay and lesbian siblings …
01-Jul-2023:
Sometimes while I’m browsing the Guardian, a large, blank orange square will load in a part of the page where there’d normally be an ad, and when this happens I …
01-Jul-2023:
Hey, macOS Preview, if I type “Chapter 3” (without quotes) in the search bar while a PDF is open, shouldn’t it be obvious that I’m looking for the next …
30-Jun-2023:
I sought a theme and
… “the Law” won.
30-Jun-2023:
Finished Claire Keegan, Walk the Blue Fields 📚. In jazz, I like pianists in whom Paul Bley’s influence is strongest — like Marcin Wasilewski — more than I like …
30-Jun-2023:
Minister for Media Catherine Martin had warned those appearing to engage in “as transparent a manner as possible”.
No more Turbidity, then. RTE before the …
30-Jun-2023:
It seems that Twitter will no longer let me view a tweet on the web unless I sign in/create an account. This really is the end. Thanks, Elon, for making it a …
29-Jun-2023:
I’ve just sent out a Talk about books post in which I discuss Caoilinn Hughes’s two novels 📖, having written about some of her short stories a year ago. The …
29-Jun-2023:
Cutting losses: Caoilinn Hughes’s novels Caoilinn Hughes’s two novels are quite different from each other and from her short stories. But both feature strained sibling and parental relations and show …
28-Jun-2023:
Jeremy Corbyn tweeted Shelley’s “Rise like lions after slumber …” to promote his own poetry. I bet he found it on the sleeve of a Jam LP. That’s where I first …
27-Jun-2023:
Ted Gioia on becoming — quite late — a Dan stan. To me they seem a contradiction: 🎶 music meticulously assembled (not simply played) in the studio that …
24-Jun-2023:
Why in the world are Elon and Zuck planning to punch each other? asks a headline on Vox. I can’t see any great mystery. Who wouldn’t want to punch either or …
24-Jun-2023:
“His brother, who is also a musician …”
Norwegian Roxy Music model Kari-Ann Moller fights to stay in UK after Brexit
23-Jun-2023:
I’ve been having trouble concentrating on work recently. I thought it might be undiagnosed ADHD (which my nephew credibly believes he has, and which sometimes …
22-Jun-2023:
Brian Cox:
There is no word for “no” in Irish Gaelic. It’s like it’s an offence to say no. They’d sooner cut your throat than say no to you. The great thing …
20-Jun-2023:
Of course, no one types URLs anymore
says Dan Kois. Huh? I never got that memo. I type dozens of URLs most days. At least I type part of them. (I’ve relied on …
19-Jun-2023:
If a particular piece of writing — an email, the introduction to a report, a press release, a student essay — can be generated by AI it probably isn’t worth …
17-Jun-2023:
If the music industry only lasted a century, so be it. It’s up to the musicians to make the music, no matter what.
This was published in April, but I’ve just …
17-Jun-2023:
I just posted on my personal site Hugo Grotius and the minimalist theory of natural law.
17-Jun-2023:
Tom Hanks first got into acting because Vincent Dowling offered him the opportunity to work for nothing. At least Dowling didn’t propose “exposure” in lieu of …
16-Jun-2023:
Sir Martin Amis was, retrospectively as it were, a knight for the last day of his life. It’s nice to realize he would have known this was coming. Who needs the …
16-Jun-2023:
I’ve noticed I’m having to charge my phone (a 2-year-old iPhone 12 Mini), more than once a day now. Time to replace it, maybe. I wouldn’t even consider getting …
16-Jun-2023:
John Self interviews Ian McEwan about 📖Amsterdam’s Booker win, 25 years on. I love the way McEwan “admits” (gleefully) that characters in his books have …
16-Jun-2023:
New Talk about books post: Anatomy of a series: Scott Turow’s Kindle County novels. And I seem to have got the new newsletter template working the way I want …
16-Jun-2023:
Anatomy of a series: Scott Turow’s Kindle County novels Although Scott Turow’s novels have a number of common themes and tropes, each of them starts from a noticeably different place. The author goes to unusual …
13-Jun-2023:
I’ve added @vincent’s Tinylytics script to just one page so far, the most recent Talk about books. I’m going to add it to the footer template, but with a …
11-Jun-2023:
Sometimes I really hate the iPad. The bezels are so skinny and my thumbs so relatively fat that I often unintentionally tap a link in the navigation panel while …
08-Jun-2023:
I’ve just read Sylvia Townsend Warner, A Stranger with a Bag 📚. A collection of 13 short stories all but two of which originally appeared in The New …
04-Jun-2023:
Salman Rushdie, Shame (1983) — Talk about books post
Yesterday, I posted “Floating upwards from history: Salman Rushdie, Shame (1983)” in Talk about books. The post appeared on the web and in the RSS feed, but …
03-Jun-2023:
The latest Talk about books post is about Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983) 📖. I found it harder to write about than I was expecting. Floating upwards from history
03-Jun-2023:
Floating upwards from history: Salman Rushdie, Shame (1983) In Shame, Salman Rushdie’s next novel after Midnight’s Children, the author attempts to fictionalize a Pakistan that he views as already partly made up. The …
24-May-2023:
LitHub has just posted an essay from the late Martin Amis’s The Rub of Time (2018) 📖. It’s about Jane Austen and what’s wrong with the adaptations of her work, …
24-May-2023:
Just read Anne Enright The Gathering 📚: Interpersonal dynamics in a large Irish family — twelve siblings born alive, though not all of them stay that way for …
22-May-2023:
The last time I ordered a book by post from the UK, it took about 6 weeks to get here, so I was prepared for a long wait for this one 📖. But it came this …
21-May-2023:
What a ridiculous way to put it! If she was 10 months older then, then she’s 10 months older than him now, unless one of them has died in the meantime, which …
21-May-2023:
I gave up on Garrett Camp’s Mix.com ages ago because it was mostly showing me stories from The Guardian, Slate and other sites I was regularly visiting anyway, …
20-May-2023:
In the latest Talk about books, I’m looking at two volumes of short stories by Kevin Barry, Dark Lies the Island (2012) and 📖That Old Country Music (2020). …
20-May-2023:
Short stories by Kevin Barry: Dark Lies the Island and That Old Country Music There’s a narrowing of range, and not just geographically, between Kevin Barry’s second and third collections of stories, but that’s not necessarily a bad …
17-May-2023:
I might be overdosing on Irish writing. I’ve spent most of today trying to write a newsletter post about Kevin Barry’s short stories. Earlier, I started to read …
16-May-2023:
I appear to be trying to persuade the leader of the Lib Dems to join a socialist Labour party that doesn’t even exist, using a GCSE study guide on the 20th …
14-May-2023:
I love this, from Lincoln Michel on the skewed distribution of AI “gains”:
… the calls to replace people with AI are focused on artists and workers rather than …
13-May-2023:
Henry Oliver has been reading David Edmonds’s new biography of Derek Parfit, and says:
… he had little sense of connections between his past and present self, …
12-May-2023:
Want to read Sylvia Townsend Warner, A Stranger With a Bag 📚. I’ve been looking for about 6 months, but it’s out of print and most secondhand copies, though not …
12-May-2023:
I’m reading Emma Forrest, Cherries in the Snow 📚. Emma Forrest is writing a short series in The Guardian about her icons. Her column on Eve Babitz prompted me …
07-May-2023:
Just read Claire Kilroy, All Names Have Been Changed 📚. A group of creative writing students gradually and painfully free themselves from the (anxiety-inducing) …
05-May-2023:
I was finding it much easier to push the water through my Aeropress ☕️, so I thought the seal must be leaking air, and bought a new one. It turns out it wasn’t …
05-May-2023:
Of course, Twitter still wouldn’t show me the Lil Nas X tweet unless I signed in first, which I can’t do because I deleted my account weeks ago. My loss, no …
05-May-2023:
Twitter seems to have found a new way to be childishly obstructive. The Twitter links from Helen Lewis’s newsletter today can’t be opened directly from the feed …
04-May-2023:
Scrolling through this ranking of Vin Diesel’s films 🍿, I can’t help wondering if he hasn’t been a bit typecast occasionally.
03-May-2023:
Finished reading Claire Kilroy, The Devil I Know 📚 An enraged, angry satire written in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse. I’d forgotten how bleak and …
03-May-2023:
Latest post from Talk about books is about two very short novels by Ian McEwan, Amsterdam and On Chesil Beach 📖. They’re starkly dissimilar — one has been …
03-May-2023:
Two short novels by Ian McEwan: Amsterdam and On Chesil Beach Two very short novels, about the same length, published 9 years apart, are starkly dissimilar — one has been described as “brilliantly acid”, the other as a …
02-May-2023:
Remind me again what Web3 was: Web3 Funding Continues To Crater — Drops 82% Year To Year
01-May-2023:
Now that Claire Kilroy has a fifth novel out, her first since 2012, it’s high time I read the two I’ve had lying around for ages. I meant to start with All …
29-Apr-2023:
This is a game changer for me: I’ve found out how to follow a Substacker’s notes without getting their emails too. It’s still an algorithmic feed but it doesn’t …
27-Apr-2023:
If we could control love, nobody would love anybody. Nobody would take that chance.
Smokey Robinson has a new album out at 83 🎶
27-Apr-2023:
Red Rock West, mentioned in the first sentence of Zach Schonfeld’s elegy for Netflix’s DVDs by Mail service, is the film that finally persuaded me that I liked …
23-Apr-2023:
Just read Dervla McTiernan, The Murder Rule 📚. The last third — once the protagonist starts to recognize that her beliefs are wrong and wouldn’t anyway have …
23-Apr-2023:
I just posted on my own site about Some books I didn’t leave behind a second time
23-Apr-2023:
Noah Smith asks Will there be a Millennial Big Chill? He doesn’t say so explicitly but this piece illustrates the folly of looking at disparities of wealth in …
22-Apr-2023:
The latest Talk about books is about the last three books in Michael Dibdin’s series (of 11) featuring the Venetian detective, Aurelio Zen 📖. Eighteen months …
22-Apr-2023:
“This persistent universe game”: The conclusion of Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen series A look at the last three books in Michael Dibdin’s series (of 11) featuring the Venetian detective, Aurelio Zen. Eighteen months ago, I wrote about Zen’s …
20-Apr-2023:
Hey @scottmclemore@mastodon.online I see from The Interval that you’re tweeting again. I fully deleted my Twitter account so I won’t be going back. I’m going to …
20-Apr-2023:
Octogenarian retired Law Lord wrote his memoirs (or at least the first volume of them) entirely on his iPhone: Joshua Rozenberg, A Lawyer Writes
17-Apr-2023:
I was in France just before Easter and I heard a young man say he was protesting against pension changes because they make him pay more to support “boomers”. …
16-Apr-2023:
Rereading End Games 📚 I’m now reading Michael Dibdin’s final book for the third time, having originally read it in November 2018 and again (as Micro.blog’s …
14-Apr-2023:
Want to read Dervla McTiernan, The Murder Rule 📚. I was in Galway at the beginning of the week and I bought the B-format paperback in Dubrays. I expected them …
14-Apr-2023:
I wanted to like Helen Lewis’s Substack post today (as I’ve done in the past) but I can’t because I no longer get her newsletter by email. I unsubscribed from …
12-Apr-2023:
One thing that worries me a bit about Substack Notes is the possibility that I might sign up for emails from Substacks that I already read in RSS, just so that …
12-Apr-2023:
I copied and am posting the link to my first Substack Note, just because I can. Don’t worry, I’m not going to make a habit of this.
11-Apr-2023:
Reading about the latest episode of Succession put me in mind of the 1970s tv series The Brothers 📺, which in turn prompted me to Google Gabrielle Drake 🎭, and …
11-Apr-2023:
Sounds like theatre-going may be the new football hooliganism: The ugly new side of theatre audiences
10-Apr-2023:
It looks as if writing.ie might have been hacked ☹️. I first thought they must have let their domain name expire, but the “Young poet’s view of today’s world” …
10-Apr-2023:
This is my favourite headline for a long time: Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud; via …
09-Apr-2023:
I just posted the latest Talk about books. It’s about Thomas Middleton’s tragedy, Women Beware Women (c. 1621). Though I love The Changeling, which he wrote …
09-Apr-2023:
“Fools will serve to father wise men’s children”: Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women (c. 1621) Women Beware Women, by Thomas Middleton alone though he often collaborated, has two tragic plots which are tightly integrated. As is true of his earlier play, …
09-Apr-2023:
Who is this Mark Read, and why does my iPad keep prompting me to undo him?
09-Apr-2023:
There was a time when I played Danilo Rea’s 🎹 Lost in Europe 🎶 constantly. I’m just listening to it for the first time in several years. It’s so good. It might …
08-Apr-2023:
Noah Smith reflects on Twitter’s reaction to the (mis)perceived threat from Substack Notes. Will Elon Musk kill Substack?. (Partly paywalled but the first 6 …
08-Apr-2023:
My CD collection has been languishing unplayed in a French attic since 2011. I wanted to bring the discs home. But not their “jewel” cases, which only add bulk …
07-Apr-2023:
I got a notice from the Irish Post Office that a Customs charge of €6.36 was due on a CD I bought. I thought that at a little over half the value of the CD the …
05-Apr-2023:
Just read Trevor Hoyle, Project Avalon 📚, a novelization of 4½ episodes from the first season of Blakes 7 📺. Though Hoyle also wrote original fiction — some of …
04-Apr-2023:
Rowdy Herrington’s Striking Distance (1993), just about my least favourite film by a director that I love — A Murder of Crows; The Stickup; I, Witness — is on …
03-Apr-2023:
I’m in France for a week, rescuing from my sister’s attic books that I left behind in 2011. I decided to rescue my CDs too, though most of them were ripped to …
03-Apr-2023:
It’s increasingly rare for me to click on a link to an NYT story but every time I have done so in the past 2 years I’ve been told that I’ve used up all my free …
03-Apr-2023:
Finished reading Julie Parsons, Eager to Please 📚. Like her first novel, Mary, Mary (1998), this is almost good. I like the plotting apart from the resolution …
02-Apr-2023:
I got a second bite at the cherry, when it comes to recovering the books of mine that had remained in my sister’s attic since 2011. And this time I found the …
01-Apr-2023:
Andrew Marr, former BBC political correspondent, used the same branch of Waitrose as I used to. I didn’t live anywhere near East Sheen but I worked there.
01-Apr-2023:
I’m visiting my sister this week. She recently got two cats, Shana and Onyx (Onyx is the black one, of course). They’re both very nervous of me, and hide where …
29-Mar-2023:
Suspended reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck 📚. i’ve read 8 of the 12 stories. The collection is a bit uneven but I’ve liked most of …
28-Mar-2023:
Read Jeffrey Eugenides, Fresh Complaint 📚. A very mixed bag; several of these (“Early Music”, “Timeshare”) are character studies rather than full stories. The …
28-Mar-2023:
Google is getting worse. It used to be that if you searched for a phrase in quotation marks it showed exact matches. I just did that and it said “Showing …
28-Mar-2023:
Almost all of Russia’s growth under Putin accrued to the top 10% of the country …
Noahpinion: Putin is a rest stop on the road of post-Soviet collapse
27-Mar-2023:
MyHeritage.com keeps sending me email reminders for birthdays of relatives who died years ago. I really ought to unsubscribe but I can’t help feeling that one …
27-Mar-2023:
Robin Rendle on The Writing of the Gods:
Forgotten and unreadable for more than a millennia, Dolnick’s book captures the strangeness of hieroglyphs and how …
26-Mar-2023:
Talk about books: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show 📖
After the death of her two children from smallpox, a conservative landowning Englishwoman goes to …
26-Mar-2023:
Paris in the springtime: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show (1936) Following the death of her two children from smallpox, a conservative landowning Englishwoman travels to Paris where she takes part in the revolution of 1848, …
26-Mar-2023:
Interview with Naomi Alderman whose 4th novel, The Power, is being adapted. I’ve been meaning to reread Disobedience 📖; I hadn’t realized that it was her first …
24-Mar-2023:
Mary Gaitskill says of her short story “Secretary”
It sounds like a porn cliche but actually I took the idea almost directly from a newspaper story.
She has …
20-Mar-2023:
Maria Bustillos in The Nation:
The breakneck deployment of half-baked AI, and its unthinking adoption by a load of credulous writers, means that Google — …
20-Mar-2023:
I enjoy Noah Smith’s Substack, Noahpinion, but I wish he’d occasionally get off the fence and let us know what he really thinks. Yes, of course we should ban …
19-Mar-2023:
my uber-Tigger-Pollyanna personality
High Court judge Sir Nicholas Mostyn on working with Parkinson’s disease
18-Mar-2023:
Enrico Pieranunzi was supposed to be playing in the Sunside (rue des Lombards, Paris) tonight but had to cancel “pour des raisons personnelles”. I really hope …
18-Mar-2023:
I don’t usually listen to or recommend podcasts from the Economist but this one has Sebastian Scotney (starting at 19:40) talking about the first part of Brad …
17-Mar-2023:
It’s just two months short of three years since I bought a refurb MacBook Air with an Intel chip and a butterfly keyboard. The keyboard has generally been …
17-Mar-2023:
Electric Literature has a list of new Irish novels due out this year. Sarah Gilmartin’s Service 📚 sounds as if it covers some of the same ground as her …
16-Mar-2023:
TIL that the toast alarm in this apartment isn’t able to tell the difference between smoke (from a hypothetical fire) and steam (from an actual shower) when I …
16-Mar-2023:
You need a special degree of ineptness to write From the number of corpses, as vast as they had been …: Goodkind must have meant ‘vast’ to modify ‘number’, but …
14-Mar-2023:
I sometimes buy secondhand books from thebookshop.ie and they usually include a surprise free book. Today’s freebie is Liz Nugent, Lying in Wait📖, which I’ve …
12-Mar-2023:
A much better than usual haul from the charity shop on Friday. I’ve read all of these already but want to read them again; I’ve known for ages that I’d soon …
12-Mar-2023:
I’d like to be able to block replies (by people on Micro.blog) to people I’m not following on Mastodon, while still seeing replies to people I’m following on …
11-Mar-2023:
The latest Talk about books post is a look at Alice Munro’s 2004 collection of short stories, Runaway📖, which includes the three stories that Pedro Almodóvar …
11-Mar-2023:
“Just a way that she has found to manage her life”: Alice Munro, Runaway (2004) A look at Alice Munro’s 2004 collection of short stories, Runaway, which includes the three stories that Pedro Almodóvar adapted for his film, Julieta (2016). …
08-Mar-2023:
Here’s a short story by Maria Farrell, Burning Men, published appropriately on International Women’s Day. I haven’t had time to read it yet so this isn’t …
06-Mar-2023:
I noticed on Friday that Substack’s RSS feeds are leaving out some links, just leaving a gap in the text. I’m not able to tell which links it’s not displaying, …
05-Mar-2023:
I just noticed that 4 out of the last 7 books I’ve read have been collections of short stories. That’s unusual for me, and I have a few more collections lined …
03-Mar-2023:
How great it is to have fast internet. I just started to transfer a file of 413 MB at 20 KB a second. This may take some time 😜
02-Mar-2023:
From The Guardian: Wayne Shorter, icon of jazz saxophone, dies aged 89 🎶
01-Mar-2023:
Joshua Rozenberg explains how the Stormont brake is supposed to work.
28-Feb-2023:
The tv dramatization of MacLaverty’s story “My Dear Palestrina” was the first thing I ever saw Liam Neeson in, and I was impressed by acting and story alike. …
28-Feb-2023:
A few days late — writing about poetry slows me down — Sunday’s post from Talk about books takes a look at William Empson’s poetry from the decade leading up to …
26-Feb-2023:
“Not human to feel safely placed”: Further reflections on the poetry of William Empson William Empson’s poetry changed after 1930. Between then and 1940, his main subject was the approach of war. And then he stopped almost completely.
25-Feb-2023:
I might reread Samantha Downing’s My Lovely Wife 📚, though I disliked the serial-killer-tortures-young-women plot. The husband narrator is obviously unreliable …
21-Feb-2023:
TIL that Text Fragments are a thing. Ingenious and potentially helpful but I’m not sure I’d actually use them. After all, if the person citing a reference can …
19-Feb-2023:
The original article seems to be behind a paywall, but Om Malik quotes a passage saying that iA Writer is “not a good app anymore”. I used to use iA Writer for …
18-Feb-2023:
I wrote last week’s Talk about books post, on Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, in a hurry, finding the novel more of a handful than I had remembered. I also didn’t …
17-Feb-2023:
Looks like I got Irréversible all wrong. I thought it was Albert Dupontel’s character, not Vincent Cassel’s, who beat someone to death with a fire extinguisher …
16-Feb-2023:
Finished Daphne du Maurier, Don’t Look Now 📚. Five longish stories, all quite different — one spooky, one SF-spooky, one naturalistic adventure, one …
13-Feb-2023:
Finished reading A S Byatt, Little Black Book of Stories 📚: 5 stories, 3 of which have supernatural or paranormal elements. In my least favourite a grieving …
11-Feb-2023:
Just trying to read a journal article on JSTOR. It’s in PDF, and if I zoom in enough to be able to read the text, I can’t see the whole page, and it doesn’t …
11-Feb-2023:
I have my work Outlook/Exchange email on my personal computer (as well as on my work one, obviously). I get really pissed off at being repeatedly nagged at the …
09-Feb-2023:
Salman Rushdie’s fourth novel is stuffed with themes which don’t always seem reconcilable yet don’t exactly clash. It’s not surprising, though unfortunate, that …
09-Feb-2023:
Two falls and a Submission: Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988) Salman Rushdie’s fourth novel is stuffed with themes which don’t always seem reconcilable yet don’t exactly clash. We get the migrant’s-eye-view, and enquiries …
07-Feb-2023:
Zombie stories aren’t dystopian, they’re wish-fulfillment dreams, and the dream they fulfill is the dream of guilt-free hatred of the Other.
says Alan Jacobs. …
04-Feb-2023:
Finished reading Mary Gaitskill, Because They Wanted To 📚. I got to like these stories more as I progressed through the book. The title story, the second in …
02-Feb-2023:
There’s an excellent review in the FT by Tanjil Rashid of Rushdie’s new novel, Victory City 📖. It’s probably paywalled but I was able to read it without a …
30-Jan-2023:
Jim Collison is not himself aphantasic but 4 of his children are. He says they’ve all done well. Interestingly, they’ve all worked in STEM fields. (The …
29-Jan-2023:
John Naughton in The Observer says that Microsoft’s backing for, and other developments at, ChatGPT are causing panic for Google/Alphabet. Maybe a good time to …
29-Jan-2023:
I see there’s a new novel by Salman Rushdie out. Coincidentally, I was just about to start rereading The Satanic Verses today, to write about it in Talk about …
28-Jan-2023:
When I was posting my stories on Medium years ago, I generally added an image at the start, as recommended. I’ve now removed all of these images except this …
26-Jan-2023:
I’ve never read any Jeffrey Eugenides but he’s an author I’ve long had in mind as somebody I should read. I think this piece in The Guardian by Dizz Tate might …
26-Jan-2023:
As a “small memorial to David Crosby”, John Naughton has chosen a Stephen Stills song. I’d have picked “Long Time Gone” or “The Lee Shore” 🎶
25-Jan-2023:
Today’s post in Talk about books is titled Social distance: Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You and it looks at Rooney’s treatment of social class in …
25-Jan-2023:
Social distance: Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) Each of Sally Rooney’s novels and several of her short stories feature a friendship or relationship across the class divide. One party is poor, the other well …
24-Jan-2023:
Maybe the book doesn’t need to be “disrupted” in the first place? suggests Lincoln Michel.
23-Jan-2023:
I bought an album by Kenny Drew on Bandcamp last week (download only, no CD) and it’s really good. Solo/Duo: 4 tracks are duets with Niels-Henning Ørsted …
23-Jan-2023:
I finished reading John Haffenden’s William Empson, Volume 1: Among the Mandarins 📚 last week, having put it aside for several months. I’ve just added a comment …
22-Jan-2023:
To absolutely nobody’s surprise, I got no takers for my offer of a sample print edition of last week’s Talk about books post. So, I decided to try making a …
21-Jan-2023:
Brad Mehldau has a book, Formation: Building a Personal Canon, Part One 📖, coming out in a couple of months. Scott Flanigan’s review is on the LJN site. There’s …
21-Jan-2023:
I keep my iTunes Library (so named since 2004) on an external disk. I found that, to import a CD, I have to reset the library location to the default, then …
21-Jan-2023:
I’ve been trying to import a CD into my Apple Music library for the first time in many months. I don’t know where it was putting the ripped audio files but not …
20-Jan-2023:
The Guardian lists Crosby’s 10 greatest recordings, including this one, which I hadn’t heard before: “Morrison” by Crosby, Prevar & Raymond. RIP 🎶
20-Jan-2023:
This really is the end of an era. Legendary US musician David Crosby dies aged 81 🎶
19-Jan-2023:
Claire Harman has some very welcome suggestions as to where to start with the stories of Katherine Mansfield 📖
18-Jan-2023:
The British tabloid press behaves shockingly, but even outrage at its flagrant racism could not sustain my interest through long passages about wedding …
17-Jan-2023:
Several analyses suggest that U.S. riders are more likely to wear helmets compared with cyclists in other countries — all while suffering the highest fatality …
17-Jan-2023:
From John Haffenden, William Empson, Vol. 1: Among the Mandarins. I’m not at all surprised but pleased to learn that Empson was apparently aphantasic. A …
17-Jan-2023:
That’s where I want to be in the future. Exploring unknown territory that empowers others and adapts to the needs of a community.
Craig Hockenberry. Whatever …
12-Jan-2023:
I’m surprised to see The Eyes of Laura Mars🍿, “this brilliant slice of giallo-esque baloney”, at number 4 in this ranking of Faye Dunaway’s best performances. I …
12-Jan-2023:
Here’s @arrroberts@mastodon.social with some important points to make about violence in contemporary writing, film and games, particularly Fantasy. What do we …
11-Jan-2023:
I have extremely mixed feelings about Caoilinn Hughes’s The Wild Laughter 📚on first reading. Some bits I really hated, yet I was never tempted to abandon it, …
11-Jan-2023:
I just posted Death in Florence: Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel and Michael Dibdin’s A Rich Full Death📖, the first Talk about books post of 2023. And I’m …
11-Jan-2023:
Death in Florence: Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel and Michael Dibdin’s A Rich Full Death In these two novels, Florence has a paradoxical quality: dry, sunny and beautiful, relatively inexpensive and with a rich cultural history, and yet home to a …
09-Jan-2023:
A year ago, I was thinking about a print edition of Talk about books, but I did something else instead (i.e. moved it from Substack to MB). It’s an idea whose …
09-Jan-2023:
It took me a whole week to read Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show 📚: it’s densely written and not to be rushed. The central character’s antisemitism …
08-Jan-2023:
Here are a few paragraphs on why publishers don’t like short story collections resurrected from an out-of-date, deleted longer post from a few years ago.
07-Jan-2023:
Hey, @manton, I see you have changed the output from Finished reading so that it’s sorted according to Finished date rather than last item edited (as it was …
05-Jan-2023:
Interesting, this, from Fay Weldon’s obituary.
… one might see connections with the reimagined fairy tales of Angela Carter, or the malevolent morality plays …
01-Jan-2023:
After 2 backspaces and 1 wrong guess, I knew what the answer was but then I accidentally hit a wrong letter. (Been doing that all day today.) Hi, @cdevroe
🔙🔙🟥🟥 …
01-Jan-2023:
Why I don’t trust Bookshop.org: The declared aim of Bookshop.org is to support independent bookshops. The effect may be to make them appear irrelevant.
01-Jan-2023:
I finished reading Helen Simpson, Dear George and Other Stories on Friday but forgot to post. The collection has several stories about motherhood, childbirth, …
31-Dec-2022:
Ah, that didn’t work after all. I edited my JSON template to delete the comments for the books that would no longer be shown, then reloaded the page and then …
31-Dec-2022:
Instead of deleting my Bookshelf page, as I considered doing, I’ve limited the Finished Reading section of the page to show only the most recent 35 books. That …
31-Dec-2022:
I didn’t mean to write a year-end look back but it happened anyway A look at some of the things I’ve been writing about in Talk about books over the past 2 years, including a list of all the posts about short stories, and a …
21-Dec-2022:
The world’s whole sap is sunk;
The general balm th’hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr’d; yet all these …
21-Dec-2022:
No Little Dorrit, no Bleak House? Bah! Where to start with Charles Dickens
20-Dec-2022:
“Effectively, my entire archive of emails either sent or received since 2014 has simply disappeared,” one such user said. “Inconvenience? It’s an absolute …
20-Dec-2022:
At the end of the year I might delete my Bookshelf page (again), though I’ll continue to use MB’s Bookshelves feature and Epilogue. I’ve been using a kind of …
20-Dec-2022:
By the end of the year, I’ll have read 72 books in 2022: a nice even 6 per month. Of those, just 2 are nonfiction: William Empson, Milton’s God and Emilie …
18-Dec-2022:
Another coincidence: Terence Eden has just posted You don’t need HTML. Just yesterday, I’d been thinking of doing something more with my Even plainer text, such …
18-Dec-2022:
A short story by acclaimed novelist Tessa Hadley: Juana the mad, about an unexpected encounter at a Christmas party.
18-Dec-2022:
Emily St John Mandel tweets that she needs to be interviewed by a journalist so she can say she’s divorced and then use the interview as evidence to update her …
16-Dec-2022:
Here’s a short note on a few lines of Marvell, pointing out something that ought to be obvious but that I missed for almost 50 years. Mistaken long: Andrew …
16-Dec-2022:
It’s now a year since I moved Talk about books from Substack to Micro.blog, taking advantage of Manton’s then newly introduced newsletter feature. The latest …
15-Dec-2022:
Intelligent AF: Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (2021) Klara and the Sun marks a return by Kazuo Ishiguro to the first-person narrative, following his departure from that mode in 2015’s The Buried Giant. But Klara …
15-Dec-2022:
Here’s a bit of a surprise: the last few mornings I’ve woken up with multiple ideas for opinionated long-form posts, something I haven’t been doing for ages. I …
14-Dec-2022:
One of her main interests is to work out how to incorporate data visualisation into fiction. I don’t think I’ve found any idea about fiction so …
11-Dec-2022:
Twitter relaunches blue tick service with higher price for iPhone users. I thought Apple didn’t allow sellers to charge less on the web than in the app? But I …
11-Dec-2022:
This time last year, I was thinking about a print edition of Talk about books. Then, Manton added a newsletter feature to Micro.blog so I shelved the print idea …
11-Dec-2022:
How a Hello Kitty guitar became Stratocaster’s hottest property. I saw this and thought it might interest @maique 🤣
09-Dec-2022:
I’m rereading Klara and the Sun 📚 at the moment, to write about it in the next Talk about books post. In the meantime, here’s a reminder of what I wrote three …
08-Dec-2022:
Now that Jason Kottke is blogging again, I think I’ll remove his feed from NetNewsWire and just visit the blog regularly instead. His blog looks a lot more …
08-Dec-2022:
Hi @help, I added Daphne du Maurier’s The Scapegoat to my Currently reading shelf at the weekend. (I think it was previously on Want to read.) Yesterday, I …
07-Dec-2022:
I just finished reading Daphne du Maurier’s The Scapegoat 📚 This is just the second du Maurier novel I’ve read, the first being My Cousin Rachel, and I think …
06-Dec-2022:
Description to the literary novelist is a form of moral commentary. Every great novel is a thought experiment — the “storytelling” aspects are more than mere …
05-Dec-2022:
Shortly after Musk bought Twitter, I said I wasn’t going to quit it in haste though I dreaded what he might do. Five weeks later, I’ve deactivated my account. …
04-Dec-2022:
A few days late, Talk about books has begun its third year of existence with another post about Wuthering Heights, a book I’ve already written about in the …
04-Dec-2022:
The role of Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights Nelly Dean, the main narrator of Wuthering Heights, is often defensive in describing her own behaviour, and evasive or even deceptive towards her “masters”. …
03-Dec-2022:
Faint praise from Adam Roberts for Nobel winner Annie Ernaux, The Years 📚
I’m not sure the book puts the necessary distance between portraying banality, …
02-Dec-2022:
Helen Lewis explains Kier Starmer, since he won’t do it himself: The Bluestocking
26-Nov-2022:
Journalism is about asking questions and refusing to accept whatever the currently accepted narrative is, whether it’s about politics or celebrities. It is not …
26-Nov-2022:
This made me laugh: Morden You Know: jazz standards within the M25
26-Nov-2022:
For some, success is a billion-dollar exit, for others success is a profitable business which employs a dozen people. For some, failure is bankruptcy, for …
24-Nov-2022:
Anne Enright pays tribute to Anthony Cronin in the Irish Times. Reading Dead as Doornails 📖 while I was living outside Ireland in the early 90s had a strong …
23-Nov-2022:
Now reading Wuthering Heights 📚 I’m rereading Emily Brontë’s only novel. Two years ago, in my third post in Talk about books, I wrote about reading it with …
23-Nov-2022:
The toast alarm has been chirping at me all day: it seems that a battery needs to be replaced. But the alarm is mains powered; how can it need a battery as …
22-Nov-2022:
I’ve just finished reading Robert Galbraith, Troubled Blood 📚 I often felt while in the middle of it that at 1000 pages it’s too long, with too many characters …
19-Nov-2022:
More than 14 years (can it really be?) after his death, a previously unreleased solo piano album by Esbjörn Svensson has just come out! How Ted Gioia joined the …
19-Nov-2022:
A few days ago I was thinking of changing the way I insert descriptions (for Twitter tags etc) into longer posts with titles. The way I’m doing it now is a bit …
18-Nov-2022:
I’ve been hand-grinding my coffee for the past 18 months or so. It’s a bit of a chore, with the result that I’ve increasingly been getting around to drinking my …
18-Nov-2022:
The first time I bought a HP LaserJet printer (July 2001) I had to call customer support because I was trying to put the toner cartridge in upside down. The …
17-Nov-2022:
My 52nd post in Talk about books, ending its second year, discusses a trilogy whose plot threads range from the implausible but entirely possible, through the …
17-Nov-2022:
An almost insignificant figure: Jonathan Holt’s Carnivia trilogy Jonathan Holt’s Venice-set trilogy mixes a collection of plotlines that range from the implausible but entirely possible, through the all too likely, to the …
16-Nov-2022:
Can’t happen too soon: Musk testifies he will ‘reduce’ time at Twitter and eventually hand over reins
15-Nov-2022:
I’m thinking about changing the way I do the descriptions for my longer posts (the Talk about books “newsletter” ones). The description is used in the Twitter …
14-Nov-2022:
OK, that makes it 2 days in a row I’ve missed doing my mbnov post. My internal clock, never a good timekeeper, seems to have gone haywire recently. I couldn’t …
13-Nov-2022:
My first thought when I woke up this morning was that I hadn’t posted anything for mbnov yesterday. It’s one of several things I meant to do but let slide. I’m …
12-Nov-2022:
Who could possibly have predicted this? Twitter blue check unavailable after impostor accounts erupt on platform
11-Nov-2022:
In this quirky and fascinating post about “xenoglossy”, Adam Roberts manages to display a cool-headed scepticism about some of the more outlandish suggested …
11-Nov-2022:
When the Tim Westwood scandal broke, people in the book world that I follow on Twitter were asking how soon they could expect the similar truth about a …
11-Nov-2022:
Musk will almost certainly sell Twitter at an eye-watering loss — a tax loss for Tesla. In the best case, he’ll do it soon, giving someone else the opportunity …
10-Nov-2022:
Andrew Marvell’s father, also Andrew, was a minister of religion (officially “lecturer”) at Holy Trinity Church, Hull. The poet said his father had been “a …
09-Nov-2022:
In theory, this conversation could continue until the end of time.
Almost certainly it won’t, but it will feel like it is doing so. Infinite conversation …
08-Nov-2022:
I don’t wilfully take up contarian positions in opposition to the consensus view (on films, for example, such as The Matrix 🍿). It just seems to happen that way …
07-Nov-2022:
In a series of 3 posts in Talk about books, under the umbrella heading “Empson’s insightful errors”, I argued that late in life critic William Empson expressed …
06-Nov-2022:
I’m rereading Jonathan Holt’s The Abomination (Carnivia Trilogy Book 1) after a few years and finding it even more enjoyable than I remembered. Holt is another …
06-Nov-2022:
Rosalie Colie’s 📖‘My Ecchoing Song’: Andrew Marvell’s Poetry of Criticism (1970) describes how Marvell alluded to other poets in a critical way. It’s one of the …
05-Nov-2022:
In line with Hamish McKenzie’s claim that Substack is not part of “the newsletter economy”, I’ve stopped describing Talk about books (originated on Substack but …
05-Nov-2022:
I hate the English lyrics to “My Way” (originally «Comme d’habitude»). I mean, “And saw it through without exemption”! What kind of line is that, and how could …
04-Nov-2022:
I’m very fond of the word admiration because it comes from the Latin for “wondering at” and I like the idea of wonder. I associate it with “marvel” and …
04-Nov-2022:
My latest post in Talk about books is about The Changeling by Middleton and Rowley, written in 1622. I don’t think I’d noticed before that it’s not a revenge …
04-Nov-2022:
Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling The greatest achievement of Middleton and Rowley is a kind of post-revenge tragedy that to start with resembles a romantic comedy.
03-Nov-2022:
On this side of the Atlantic, license with an “s” is a verb, while the noun has a second “c”. At least I think that’s how it works, it’s a very long time since …
02-Nov-2022:
Today I’m writing about a play that was first performed in the 1620s. It’s The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, a feast of lechery and …
01-Nov-2022:
Judge Florence Pan has ruled against the merger of Simon & Schuster with Penguin Random House. I’m pretty sure this is the right decision but the rationale …
01-Nov-2022:
I haven’t yet managed to figure out whether I should take part in the November MB challenge, so I’ll try to keep my options open for the time being.
31-Oct-2022:
Noah Smith has a timely roundup of his previous posts about Twitter. His opinion as to what needs to be fixed hasn’t changed much: get rid of the Quote Tweet …
30-Oct-2022:
I just posted on my own site an addendum to last week’s Talk about books post about Ian McEwan’s spy fiction: I wanted to write specifically about the “trick” …
30-Oct-2022:
It’s striking how small a role the Handmaids play in The Testaments 📖. There are 3 narrators, one an Aunt (who wears brown). The second is training to become an …
29-Oct-2022:
Just finished reading Margaret Atwood, The Testaments 📚 I enjoyed this even more than The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s a longer, more complex story with three …
29-Oct-2022:
I’m not going to quit Twitter in haste, even though I dread what the new boss is going to do with it. Maybe he’ll get bored and quickly sell it off cheaply to …
28-Oct-2022:
Science fiction author and Professor of nineteenth-century literature Adam Roberts is one of the people I’ll miss following if I have to delete my Twitter …
28-Oct-2022:
One thing is worse than Twitter now being the private property of a multi-billionaire tech bro: people I follow keep retweeting comments about him. I might have …
28-Oct-2022:
The spooks have been getting their own back [on Suella Braverman]. Is that a form of poetic justice — or a dangerous interference with the democratic process? …
28-Oct-2022:
The price of coffee has gone up since the last time I ordered, so I had to buy just 3 Kg to qualify for free delivery this time instead of 4 Kg as had always …
25-Oct-2022:
Filled in a form online to move my electricity account from the old apartment. At the end, it said it couldn’t complete the switch and I should phone. There’s a …
24-Oct-2022:
I’ve started to read Margaret Atwood, The Testaments 📚 at last. I borrowed the hardback from my sister months ago. It’s about time I got around to it 😎
24-Oct-2022:
Got it on my last chance 😎
🔙🔙🟥🟩
Stupid 297 2/2/2
24-Oct-2022:
I always had a picture of the life I wanted
says FT reviewer Janan Ganesh. I never had (not having pictures of anything). I had assumed that I was unusual in …
23-Oct-2022:
My latest Talk about books post is about Ian McEwan’s two spy novels, The Innocent (1990) and Sweet Tooth (2012) 📖 But I seem to have broken the archive page: …
23-Oct-2022:
Sweet and Innocent: Spy stories by Ian McEwan Ian McEwan wrote two spy novels, published 22 years apart. Both of them tend to support my view that spy fiction is largely about sex.
23-Oct-2022:
Virago founder Carmen Callil remembered by her friend Rachel Cooke: ‘Of course she was difficult’
21-Oct-2022:
How do I end a call on an iPhone when the red button isn’t visible and only the green one is showing? I’ve been restarting the phone but there must be an easier …
16-Oct-2022:
For the past few days Sonny Condell’s “Down in the City” 🎶 has been inexplicably (till now) running around my head repeatedly. It’s the line “I’m up on the top …
13-Oct-2022:
The trend that Substack is part of is not a newsletter trend
says Hamish McKenzie. And, a little earlier
The term ‘newsletter’ was just a rhetorical device … …
12-Oct-2022:
So RTÉ imposes conditions for interviewing Shane Ross about his book on Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald — certain topics must not be mentioned — and then …
12-Oct-2022:
The web is already drowning in articles that read as if they were generated by machines trained to produce bland uniformity. Anybody deliberately setting out to …
11-Oct-2022:
I’m about to abandon Amy Bloom’s White Houses. It’s not dreadful, but I’m impatient to get on to something else. The description of Hick’s mother’s death was …
11-Oct-2022:
Zuck: Twitter is the clown car that fell into a goldmine.
Musk: A clown car? I should be driving that!
10-Oct-2022:
I’ve started to read Amy Bloom, White Houses, a novel based on the long relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok (“Hick”). I’m finding it …
10-Oct-2022:
London Jazz News’s Mothers in Jazz series has now reached Icelandic pianist Sunna Gunnlaugs who has a new trio album coming out soon 🎹 🎶
09-Oct-2022:
Four days late (sorry), my latest Talk about books newsletter post is about Sophie Hannah’s detective fiction series centred on Spilling CID. Sophie Hannah, the …
09-Oct-2022:
Sophie Hannah, the Simon Waterhouse/Charlie Zailer series Hannah’s series centred on Spilling CID combines ingenious puzzle-solving with psychological acuity and a dissection of dysfunctional family (and workplace) …
08-Oct-2022:
🔙🔙🟥🟩
Stupid 281 2/2/2
Tricky but I got there in the (very) end. @cdevroe
07-Oct-2022:
Helen Lewis is back, having spent most of September finishing a book. The Bluestocking vol 251
05-Oct-2022:
Talk about books newsletter: another slight delay, I’m afraid
I had intended to write today about four of the 11 novels in Sophie Hannah’s Simon and Charlie series, namely A Room Swept White (2010), Kind of Cruel (2012), …
02-Oct-2022:
His own fortune secure, he’s now decided that it’s best for the world if writers, publishers, agents, and booksellers can’t make a living.
Ken Whyte on …
24-Sep-2022:
Two of my favourite recorded performances of “’Round Midnight” are those by Keith Jarrett and Charlie Haden (Last Dance) and Jürgen Friedrich (Pollock). But …
24-Sep-2022:
Incidentally, Naoise is my middle name. Until recently it was invariably considered a boy’s name. I’ve no objection to Irish parents appropriating traditionally …
24-Sep-2022:
I finished reading Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times 📚last night, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s essentially a love story, though an unusually nuanced and …
22-Sep-2022:
Here’s an entertaining and informative speculation by Noah Smith about the ways in which artificial intelligence may resemble Lovecraftian horror.
21-Sep-2022:
Present discontinuous: Tense and tension in J M Coetzee’s Disgrace 📖 Today’s issue of Talk about books newsletter is about J M Coetzee’s 1999 novel, written …
21-Sep-2022:
I should have remembered to edit the email version of today’s newsletter to remove the Twitter embed. It works fine in the web post, but in the email the next 3 …
21-Sep-2022:
Present discontinuous: Tense and tension in J M Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) J M Coetzee’s 1999 Booker winner is written almost entirely in the present tense. It’s a surprising choice for a book whose themes are so grave and disturbing. …
18-Sep-2022:
I was enthusiastic about Kavanagh’s poetry while at school and afterwards, until I read Anthony Cronin’s Dead as Doornails which turned me mildly ambivalent. I …
18-Sep-2022:
It took me a whole week to finish rereading Shame (1983) though it’s much shorter than most of Rushdie’s novels. I suspected I’d been unfair to it previously or …
18-Sep-2022:
I just posted this on my personal site about Louise Nealon’s novel, Snowflake 📖. It’s kind of a supplement to my most recent newsletter issue, about 2 of her …
17-Sep-2022:
I only just found out that this live recording exists of Chick Corea and Stanley Clarke playing as a duo in Marciac. I was actually in Marciac that year (2014) …
16-Sep-2022:
Nobody is so awful that they don’t have any redeeming qualities. You can say what you like about Thérèse Coffey but at least she’s opposed to the Oxford comma 😜
15-Sep-2022:
Shorter words are harder. The more letters there are the less the likelihood that there will be several possible answers
🔙🟥🟥
Stupid 258 2/1/2
Stupid word game — …
10-Sep-2022:
I’m now rereading Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983) for the first time since the 1980s or early 90s. I want to write eventually about it, The Satanic Verses, …
10-Sep-2022:
Much as I love the title’s echo the work of a different Andrew M, I haven’t yet made up my mind to read Instant Fires, reviewed here in the Irish Times. I …
08-Sep-2022:
This issue of Talk about books (newsletter) is a bit later and shorter than expected. I’d intended to write about the novel Snowflake as well as two short …
08-Sep-2022:
Two short stories by Louise Nealon, author of the novel Snowflake Louise Nealon’s first published short story, “What feminism is”, won a prestigious prize. I’ve found only one other short story by her online, “The possibility …
06-Sep-2022:
Oh, I didn’t notice till after I posted the link that that interview is available as audio! I just read it in the feed reader without seeing the audio link. I …
06-Sep-2022:
Here’s a fascinating interview by Henry Oliver (who is writing about late starters) with economist Noah Smith. It’s largely about motivation, a topic that I’ve …
01-Sep-2022:
I’ve just finished reading Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel. I think it may be the first thing by du Maurier I’ve read but it won’t be the last by any …
01-Sep-2022:
Palin into insignificance (again): Sarah Palin loses Alaska special election to Democrat Mary Peltola
31-Aug-2022:
My old bookshelf page had notes or comments for many of the books I had read, from a JSON data template (to which I added the comments by hand as I finished the …
30-Aug-2022:
I stopped updating my bookshelves at the beginning of July. There’s something about tracking my reading that feels wrong to me. But @Manton’s improvements to …
28-Aug-2022:
Finished rereading Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency for the first time in more than 30 years. Hilarious and clever. I don’t remember Adams’s second Dirk …
28-Aug-2022:
Useful search results from the library’s ereading app.
24-Aug-2022:
It’s crime fiction yet again in this issue of my newsletter, Talk about books. I’ve written about The Good Turn, the third book in Dervla McTiernan’s Galway-set …
24-Aug-2022:
“People I should trust”: Dervla McTiernan, The Good Turn (2020) The third book in Dervla McTiernan’s series featuring DS Cormac Reilly is a bit of a departure from the first two. Unfortunately, the publishers don’t seem to …
24-Aug-2022:
How authorship of “a delightfully diverse set of papers” was ascribed to JC Shakespeare, who may be related to TA Shakespeare: Terence Eden
23-Aug-2022:
Often when people quote poetry on Substack they enclose it in tags. This doesn’t look great, particularly in an RSS reader. I suggest putting verse in a quoted …
17-Aug-2022:
Rather incongruously, this powerful piece, about how highly experienced experts can still make dangerous errors, made me want to listen to some Esbjörn …
14-Aug-2022:
Anne Enright’s introduction to Nuala O’Faolain’s second volume of memoir, Almost There (following Are You Somebody? in 1996) 📚
13-Aug-2022:
I’m playing this piece of shit Yamaha electric grand piano … It’s ugly, but it was loud and it was clear and it was in tune. But you can hear it sounds funny, …
13-Aug-2022:
My upstairs neighbour got a hardback copy of The Satanic Verses 📖 as a Christmas present in 1988 and he gave me a loan of it, so I had read it before the …
13-Aug-2022:
I described Midnight’s Children as “the most important English-language novel of the second half of the twentieth century”. I believe this to be true, though of …
10-Aug-2022:
In the latest issue of my newsletter, Talk about books, I discuss Prison and prisoners in the crime novels of Peter Abrahams, specifically Delusion, Lights Out, …
10-Aug-2022:
Fit the crime: Prison and prisoners in the crime novels of Peter Abrahams When a character in one of Peter Abrahams’s novels goes to prison for a long stretch, he may or may not be guilty of the crime of which he’s been convicted. …
09-Aug-2022:
Noah Smith has done it again: made me read a whole post about crypto. I think I finally understand what NFTs are supposed to be doing.
08-Aug-2022:
Fascinating Twitter thread
07-Aug-2022:
A friend of mine wanted to quote “American Football” in the programme to a play of his own that he was putting on in the Rosemary Branch, Hoxton, in 1996. …
07-Aug-2022:
David Hare on Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, Maggie Nelson, Rachel Kushner, Colm Tóibín, Helen Lewis and others. Matthew Reisz in The Observer
06-Aug-2022:
You’re kidding, right?
03-Aug-2022:
I hate password managers. I’m trying to log in to spectatorworld․com but Keychain will neither show me the saved password nor fill it in automatically. So, I …
03-Aug-2022:
Just testing the ability to put parentheses around an MB username that one user (@odd) mentioned earlier. Update: I tried it with ​ before …
03-Aug-2022:
As a cyclist, I think it’s ridiculous that legislation should encourage pedestrians to rely entirely on their hearing to warn of approaching vehicles. Also that …
01-Aug-2022:
The most important lesson you will learn is that border officials may not know the law and yet are infinitely empowered.
Nesrine Malik, Only a country as …
31-Jul-2022:
My descriptions of the short stories I had added to my Mix collection were lost when Mix got rid of comments. I’m starting very gradually to replace some of the …
31-Jul-2022:
The doctor said the reason why the bruises looked so bad was because I have thin skin. I told her I found that remark offensive. She didn’t get it.
Seán …
30-Jul-2022:
I was very tempted to abandon Alan Glynn’s Paradime (2016). The opening chapters, in which a man with PTSD flounders hopelessly, were painful to read. But it …
30-Jul-2022:
Thank you, @help, those posts are showing now 😎
29-Jul-2022:
Hi, @help. I’ve noticed that some of my posts containing the book emoji aren’t showing up on the Books discovery page. This one, for example. I thought it might …
29-Jul-2022:
Ted Gioia, How My Career as a Poet Was Killed by Kraft’s Macaroni & Cheese. Yeah, I hate it when that happens.
28-Jul-2022:
… though [Martin] Brest had final cut on the movie, he was strong-armed into recutting it from a weird, offbeat movie about a gangster who wants out into a …
28-Jul-2022:
Johnson led a government that played fast and loose with the rule of law.
And continues to lie about it, of course: Joshua Rozenberg
27-Jul-2022:
The new issue of my email newsletter, Talk about books, is about Ted Chiang’s novella (or long short story) from his collection 📚Exhalation (2019), “Anxiety is …
27-Jul-2022:
Who knows where the timeline goes?: Ted Chiang, “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom” Ted Chiang’s 19,750-word novella, “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”, is at once a moral fable and a dazzling meditation on whether it might be possible to …
25-Jul-2022:
I was fed up trying to read Twitter on a small (iPhone 12 Mini) screen so I created a new Twitter list of people I’m most likely to want to read on my phone, …
24-Jul-2022:
I just added another short story to my list of short stories that are available to be read online. It’s Sarah Hall’s “Wilderness”, which appeared in The …
24-Jul-2022:
I’ve just finished reading Caoilinn Hughes’s first (2018) novel, Orchid & the Wasp. Very ambitious; loosely combining ideas from Deleuze and Guattari, …
23-Jul-2022:
Today was the first day for several months that I’ve been cycling in the rain 🚲. I didn’t notice that the weather app on my phone was showing the wrong …
21-Jul-2022:
Two simple rules for using Twitter.
Make sure you’re seeing “Latest Tweets”, not “Home” (which will show you tweets you didn’t choose to see)
Be careful who …
20-Jul-2022:
To some people, it’s liberating: They think tracking viewership isn’t a showrunner’s job anyway, and there was never a time when Hollywood decisions felt …
19-Jul-2022:
I’ve finally got around to starting to read Orchid & The Wasp, having bought a copy a few months ago around the time I wrote about Caoilinn Hughes’s short …
18-Jul-2022:
I called my academic friend and wept until she gave me her NCBI log-in details.
That’s something you can do? I wish someone had told me earlier. The strange …
17-Jul-2022:
Last week I read a description of Wuthering Heights — here, if you’re interested — that struck me as drastically wrong, so I thought it was as good a time as …
14-Jul-2022:
Because they can. Via The Overspill
13-Jul-2022:
The first book in a series (of 5 so far) set in Restoration London depicts a city experiencing an unaccustomed degree of social mobility, much of it downwards. …
13-Jul-2022:
“Like ghosts, while London burns”: Andrew Taylor, The Ashes of London (2016) The first book in a series (of 5 so far) set in Restoration London depicts a city experiencing an unaccustomed degree of social mobility, much of it downwards.
10-Jul-2022:
Is anybody surprised by this? I’m a bit surprised that we’re getting to hear about it. Uber broke laws, duped police and secretly lobbied governments, leak …
10-Jul-2022:
In his newsletter, SHuSH, publisher Ken Whyte predicts that sharp increases in the cost of printed books will make ebooks start to seem more attractive again to …
10-Jul-2022:
I’ve updated — for the first time in 3½ months — my page of short stories that can be read online: I’ve added A S Byatt’s “Sea Story”. It’s been available …
09-Jul-2022:
“How do you feel about spoilers?” somebody asked in a Copper discussion thread so, not for the first time on this topic, I went off on a rant.
09-Jul-2022:
Now that I’m no longer using Bookshelves data to populate pages on my Micro.blog or necessarily updating it when I start or finish a book I’m wondering if I …
09-Jul-2022:
I just logged in to Teams on my phone at the weekend, 2FA and all, purely to get rid of the annoying red unread count badge. Why have I still got Teams on my …
08-Jul-2022:
The early middle (formerly known as the dark) ages actually did happen after all. (Sorry if that’s a spoiler, the post is well worth reading anyway). Via Helen …
08-Jul-2022:
The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the ongoing discussions.
In other words, they are authorized to speak to the …
07-Jul-2022:
That was a tricky one, @cdevroe. So many possibilities. (I like them like that.) 👍😎
🔙🔙🟥🟥
Stupid 188 2/2/2
07-Jul-2022:
I’ve read Andrew Taylor, Blacklist 📚. For a while the plot seemed overstuffed, too many minor characters being blackmailed, threatened or killed; but the ending …
07-Jul-2022:
Allegedly fake Chagall includes “recurrent iconographic elements of Chagall’s work” but these lack “real presence”, according to authentication committee. “Real …
07-Jul-2022:
So the great Johnson intends to stay on as PM till the new Tory leader has been chosen. I’m trying to think of a phrase that rhymes with “lame duck”.
03-Jul-2022:
Just finished reading Andrew Taylor, The Ashes of London, the first in his series set in Restoration London, starting with the great fire. I’d already read the …
03-Jul-2022:
Sebastian Scotney went to hear Marc Copland, Adrian Vedady and Jim Doxas at the Montréal International Jazz Festival. They’re making a trio album together and …
01-Jul-2022:
I’ve just read Louise Welsh’s The Girl on the Stairs (2012) 📖. I suppose it’s about the way impending childbirth can distort someone’s perceptions, not to …
30-Jun-2022:
The current issue of my newsletter, Talk about books, is about James Plunkett’s 1959 collection of short stories, The Trusting and the Maimed. It’s out of …
30-Jun-2022:
James Plunkett, The Trusting and the Maimed (1959) A collection of 12 short stories dating from the 1950s by the author of Strumpet City is long out of print but worth seeking out.
29-Jun-2022:
I’ve deleted the Bookshelf and Books to read pages from my micro.blog, though I’ve kept backups and could restore them if I change my mind. I don’t think I want …
29-Jun-2022:
(The Athletic has a paywall, though unfortunately I couldn’t see it when the Javascript on my browser broke.)
Yeah, really ought to get around to doing …
28-Jun-2022:
Natural selection has shaped the living world, he argues, but so too has a sort of formless cosmic drifting that can, from time to time, assemble order from …
28-Jun-2022:
It’s good to be kept informed.
27-Jun-2022:
I just got a very battered but complete and readable paperback copy of Andrew Taylor’s 1988 spy novel, Blacklist, in the post. I would have settled for the …
26-Jun-2022:
Here’s a concert I’d love to have got to. The first time I saw the Brad Mehldau Trio was in the Barbican in Feb 2006. The sound/mix was dreadful until the …
26-Jun-2022:
Hey, I seem to be able to access Substack with Safari again. I’ve no idea what’s changed; can’t help feeling that it probably won’t last. Now to see if I can …
26-Jun-2022:
Can’t help wondering if a data goldmine is actually useful for any purpose and if so for what? How TikTok is turning a generation of video addicts into a data …
25-Jun-2022:
I’ve just started to read Robin Sloan’s 2009 novella, Annabel Scheme, which I downloaded free from his site about 2 years ago but hadn’t got around to reading …
25-Jun-2022:
I found the first series of Westworld very disappointing and didn’t watch any more, only to be told later that it had got a lot better and I was missing out. It …
25-Jun-2022:
I suspect there are going to be plenty of Republican legislators in GOP-controlled states thinking “Oh shit, we got what we were asking for.” The Supreme Court …
24-Jun-2022:
Another look at why I reacted so adversely to le Carré’s Smiley’s People on first reading. “A preferable technique to bribery”: The nature of coercion in …
24-Jun-2022:
You gotta be cruel to be kind
Wayne Robins, Nick Lowe’s quality rock and roll revue 🎶
22-Jun-2022:
I’ve read Lucy Foley, The Guest List 📚 and added a brief comment to my bookshelf page: Highly entertaining but very contrived plot. The identity of the murder …
19-Jun-2022:
He added some Verbaluce™ to the drip, and soon I was feeling the same things but saying them better.
Verbaluce™ sounds just what I need. Will it be coming to …
17-Jun-2022:
Long but mostly interesting piece from Hamish McKenzie explains (among much else) why Substack took VC funding: Escape from Hell World.
16-Jun-2022:
The current issue of my email newsletter, Talk about books, discusses Kate Atkinson’s spy novel, Transcription (2018), a book I enjoyed even more on rereading …
16-Jun-2022:
A fabulist’s adventure: Kate Atkinson, Transcription Kate Atkinson’s spy novel is a compelling synthesis of references to le Carré, remarkable real-life operations against British fifth columnists and a heroine …
16-Jun-2022:
The novel … has a million jobs to choose from, and each individual novel can pick what fits.
It shouldn’t need saying but it apparently needs regular …
12-Jun-2022:
I renewed the domain name registration of “talkaboutbooks.net” for a second year a few days ago, so I suppose I must be taking this newsletter thing seriously.
12-Jun-2022:
I’m rereading Kate Atkinson, Transcription, which I first read in about August 2020. I’m surprised at how much I had forgotten of the spy fiction plot, though …
08-Jun-2022:
I’ve been enjoying bassist Thomas Fonnesbaek’s 🎶 recordings with Enrico Pieranunzi 🎹 but have just realized that I probably saw him live about 5 years ago. I …
07-Jun-2022:
Last year, I tried to cancel my Irish Times subscription but they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: a year at half price, just €6 a month. If they’re going to …
07-Jun-2022:
I like the Irish Times website redesign. But how long is it going to keep nagging me to enable notifications? Shouldn’t there be a checkbox labeled “Don’t ask …
06-Jun-2022:
Sorry to see the return of MagSafe on the MacBook Air: it’s not a major irritant in itself but it suggests that Apple is focused more on eye-catching gimmicks …
06-Jun-2022:
The most recent issue of Talk about books is longer than usual and a few days late. It’s about the last two books (the 5th and 6th) in Tana French’s series set …
06-Jun-2022:
Daughters and fathers: Tana French, The Secret Place and The Trespasser The last two books in the Dublin Murder Squad series feature the same two detectives in very different settings, and reflect the differences in their varied …
03-Jun-2022:
This time, it worked. I don’t know what’s going on.
03-Jun-2022:
Now I can’t sign in to The Guardian (which insists on a sign-in before it will let me read anything). I don’t want to stop using Safari (the only browser I know …
01-Jun-2022:
I deleted all my cookies and browser history, and had to sign in to The Guardian again. My password wasn’t what I thought it was, so I had to reset it. I …
01-Jun-2022:
I can’t sign in to Substack any more. Earlier today, I couldn’t use Google, and some other sites. So, I deleted all cookies and Google came back. But there are …
01-Jun-2022:
Here’s an interview with Karen Jennings, author of An Island, that @zioibi and I were nattering about a few days ago 📚
01-Jun-2022:
Another slight delay but this will be worth waiting for
I’ve finally reached the last two novels in Tana French’s series about the fictional Dublin Murder Squad. Unfortunately, my discussion of them is going to be a …
01-Jun-2022:
I don’t like the tiny bezels on my 3rd gen iPad Air. The screen could do with being just a little narrower. But the bigger annoyance is that I’m constantly …
30-May-2022:
Try our weights and measures quiz I got 16 out of 18. The two I got wrong were the grams/lb conversion and the number of gallons in a peck (and it beats me all …
27-May-2022:
I was totally on the wrong track today.
🔙🔙🟥🟥
Stupid 147 2/2/2
27-May-2022:
It says here that Sir Richard Dearlove was “a former director of MI6 between 1999 and 2004”. If he was a former director then, surely he’s still a former …
24-May-2022:
I just got an email from the library to say that Ted Chiang’s Exhalation (ebook) 📚 which I had on reserve is now ready to be borrowed. I’ve read just one or two …
23-May-2022:
Read Karen Jennings, An Island 📚 It seemed the most interesting book that didn’t make it from the Booker longlist for 2021 to the shortlist. It’s a powerful, …
22-May-2022:
My ravenous newsletter has been devouring most of what I’ve written these last few months. I’m afraid I’ve been neglecting my personal site (not exactly a …
22-May-2022:
On a whim I thought I’d take another shot at downloading the Copper books app. It has become available in Ireland in the meantime (iPhone only, I think), so …
22-May-2022:
The photo shoot – Osman’s 6 ft 7 next to the diminutive Keyes with her dark fringe and spiky eyelashes – resembles one between Roald Dahl’s BFG and Matilda. …
22-May-2022:
Sandra Newman: Do I want men to go away? No
Hard to believe. Even I want some men to go away, some of the time.
22-May-2022:
Long ago, before I knew about aphantasia, I told 2 visual artists that I don’t have a visual imagination. They looked at me askance. I took it as reproach for …
21-May-2022:
Another successful actor/comedian/public personality turns out to have been using his — the examples I have in mind are all male — high profile to build an …
20-May-2022:
A new viral ‘Bionic Reading’ tool … could completely change the way you read and consume content
… it says here. Well it might change the way I …
20-May-2022:
Never mind — I found it: How to use the new text editing gestures. First attempts suggest it doesn’t work very well.
20-May-2022:
I’m really starting to hate i[Pad]OS. A particular irritant is when I tap in the middle of a body of text, hoping for the popup that will allow me to “Select …
19-May-2022:
In the rhythm of “The Wife Is Praised”, Empson is alluding to Swinburne’s “Dolores”, jollied up: “I want it more homely and jolly”. But rereading it and writing …
18-May-2022:
William Empson’s wife, Hetta (née Crouse), had a long-standing practice of taking younger male lovers. Her husband wanted to join in the fun. So naturally he …
18-May-2022:
And not to yield: William Empson, “The Wife Is Praised” William Empson’s wife, Hetta (née Crouse), had a long-standing practice of taking younger male lovers. Her husband wanted to join in the fun. So naturally he …
15-May-2022:
but if I had a sister, even if I didn’t care for her much, I don’t think I’d be quite so happy to stare at her corpse. And I stare at a lot of corpses.
What’s …
14-May-2022:
As I’ve said before, I’m not generally a fan of Emil Viklicky’s piano-playing but I do like the duo album he made with George Mraz, Together Again (to which I’m …
14-May-2022:
Poets are not normally thought of as either efficient or conscientious.
The subject is Marvell, of course, but do you recognize the author?
14-May-2022:
I don’t believe it. I read (very nearly) a whole post on the subject of Bitcoin! Quite likely the last one I’ll ever read: Noah Smith (Noahpinion), “What kind …
10-May-2022:
I must remember not to go to Insomnia any more, old habits notwithstanding. I was in one branch yesterday where they still serve espresso in real cups but most …
07-May-2022:
I signed up to the waiting list to get an invitation to Copper books last year. Recently, the invitation arrived with a link to download the iOS app. However, …
07-May-2022:
Once again, we are among reasonably well off students at Trinity College Dublin.
Well, yes, on average. Frances is broke and Bobbi is rich, as in Normal People …
06-May-2022:
Windows says it 13° and raining, iOS that it’s 16° and cloudy, with sunny spells expected for the rest of the day. At least iOS has a better idea of my …
06-May-2022:
My favourite Beatle is David Crosby 🎶
04-May-2022:
Finished reading Rosemary Jenkinson, Lifestyle Choice 10mg. The title of this collection should have given me a clue, but I was surprised by the amount of …
04-May-2022:
The latest issue of my newsletter, Talk about books, is about Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 novel, The Buried Giant, with a brief reference to When We Were Orphans 📖
04-May-2022:
“Solemn oaths undone in cruel slaughter”: Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant The first of Ishiguro’s novels not to have the protagonist as a first-person narrator examines the founding myths of the English and Welsh nations and imagines …
04-May-2022:
Mr. Musk works in a way that only the “most confident leaders do,” said Tim Draper, a venture capitalist … “Think J.F.K., George Washington and Ronald Reagan.” …
03-May-2022:
If you could kill Putin, would you? I would. And I’m a total peacenik.
Graham Nash on toxic masculinity — there’s another kind? — not least his own 🎶
03-May-2022:
I’ve said before that iOS badly needs a fast way to collapse the selection (either forwards or backwards). What it needs even more is a way to paste the …
03-May-2022:
Is it time to retire psychoanalytic literary criticism?
Henry Oliver asks. And he’s not too impressed by Four Thousand Weeks📚 (which I’ve no immediate …
03-May-2022:
I’ve gone back to reading printed books as much as possible. But I don’t print out drafts of my own writing. Not yet anyway though that Paul Graham thread has …
03-May-2022:
Paul Graham reading essays on a phone screen
02-May-2022:
I somehow overlooked The Garlands of Repose when I was writing my thesis on Marvell, though its title comes from “The Garden” and O’Loughlin’s essay on “Upon …
01-May-2022:
… alternative means of resolution, such as meditation and arbitration …
Meditation is the current big thing, of course, but I hope it doesn’t entirely displace …
30-Apr-2022:
I went back to Twitter 18 months ago, after a 2-year break. I haven’t regretted my return (though I’ve been a lot more careful about who I followed this time …
28-Apr-2022:
“I’ve just heard that Chapters on Parnell Street is reopening.”
Now, that’s how to bury the lede.
The Irish Times: Kevin Power can’t stop buying books
27-Apr-2022:
“Ollscoil na Gaillimhe – University of Galway”: so good they named it twice. Or, if you’re counting historically, four times. Irish Times, NUI Galway to change …
27-Apr-2022:
I stopped using the Twitter app on both iPhone and iPad. On iPad I use the web interface in Safari and on iPhone I have Spring Mini (iOS app store link). I’m …
26-Apr-2022:
Preparing to write about The Buried Giant (2015) in my newsletter, I went back to read my previous post about Never Let Me Go 📖. One friend implied that I focus …
26-Apr-2022:
Finished Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun📚last night. I’ll need to read this a second time before I have anything to say about it other than that I enjoyed it …
26-Apr-2022:
I’ve started to read Rosemary Jenkinson, Lifestyle Choice 10mg📖. I bought the paperback direct from the publisher after they cancelled her new book: my …
25-Apr-2022:
Years ago, a Dutch friend gave out to me for eating clementines (clemenules), which were obviously the work of humans and not “natural”. That didn’t bother me. …
21-Apr-2022:
I’ve added Orchid & The Wasp to my Suspended bookshelf. I started an ebook edition from the library but I’ve put it aside. I may have temporarily overdosed …
21-Apr-2022:
I’ve been thinking about trying to get a ticket for Tord Gustavsen trio at Bray Jazz festival on 1 May. I saw the trio there (with Mats Eilertsen on bass) in …
21-Apr-2022:
It’s only recently I discovered that the reason I hadn’t been hearing much about Christine Tobin lately was that she had moved to New York 5 years ago. Now she …
20-Apr-2022:
Caoilinn Hughes has published one book of poetry and two novels, all award-winning. Her short stories have won prizes too, but have not been published in a …
20-Apr-2022:
Ephemeral Woman in waterlogged landscape: Short stories by Caoilinn Hughes Though Caoilinn Hughes’s short stories have won prizes, they have not been published in a collection. I list 8 stories that can be read online, and discuss 3 of …
19-Apr-2022:
Whenever I update iOS or iPadOS, the update sneakily turns Bluetooth on and it usually takes me a few days (once it took several weeks) to notice that my …
18-Apr-2022:
I’ve been reading some short stories by Caoilinn Hughes online and I came across this Google talk from a few years ago by/with her, which I thought was pretty …
16-Apr-2022:
The Pen Corner🖋 is closing down after 95 years in business. This is sad but obviously not surprising: Much-loved Dublin city shop Pen Corner to close its doors
16-Apr-2022:
I’m wondering again how long it’s going to take the manufacturers and positioners of bike stands to notice that mountain bikes, with extra wide handlebars, have …
15-Apr-2022:
In desperation, I removed this line from layouts/partials/head.html
<link rel=“stylesheet” href="{{ “css/main.css” | relURL …
15-Apr-2022:
Headings in newsletter posts — and other posts with titles
If you have received this post by email, please ignore it. It’s a test and I intend to try to delete the email before the it is sent out. If I haven’t managed …
14-Apr-2022:
Here’s a great list of neglected or forgotten books that deserve more attention. I found it thanks to John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. The universe is clearly …
13-Apr-2022:
I finished reading Louise Nealon’s Snowflake and I’ve added a brief comment/note to my bookshelf page. I’ll be rereading the book and writing about it in …
12-Apr-2022:
Anne Trubeck’s newsletter on “The problems with indie booskstores” is behind a paywall but the subscription is not expensive and there’s a 7-day free trial. She …
12-Apr-2022:
I’d say unless you’re directly working for Musk, it’s simpler just to ignore him. … (As a general rule, I don’t think it’s worth following anyone with more than …
12-Apr-2022:
… and set a bookmark for the UK front page of the Guardian. Trying to get there by normal navigation eventually became too frustrating on the iPhone’s tiny …
12-Apr-2022:
As I said before I tend to use autocomplete instead of bookmarks for sites I visit regularly. I formed this habit before the iPhone existed, but I continue …
12-Apr-2022:
Henry Oliver quit his job on his 35th birthday to ✏️write a book — about opsimaths. (What would a 35-year-old whippersnapper know about that subject?). I’ll buy …
11-Apr-2022:
The enumerator collected my census form yesterday evening. In the end, I left the time capsule box blank. If humans still exist in 2122, they’re probably going …
11-Apr-2022:
Sophia Domancich, whom I’ve previously heard play in a trio with Simon Goubert (d) and Jean-Jacques Avenel (b), has a solo piano album out, reviewed here 🎶 🎹
11-Apr-2022:
a bunch of smart people can get very big things wrong for a very long period of time, and that period of time may include the present.
Noah Smith on why …
10-Apr-2022:
I finished reading Keith Ridgway’s A Shock yesterday and added a short comment about it to my bookshelf page this morning. I’m not sure what to make of it …
10-Apr-2022:
When I saw the name of this trio, HÜM, my first thought was that the album might be by [Daniel] Humair, [René] Urtreger and [Pierre] Michelot but of course it’s …
09-Apr-2022:
I haven’t read much by Roy Foster, here on Conversations with Tyler, but I remember an essay that struck me (nearly 10 years ago) as the most sensible and …
09-Apr-2022:
The Weather app on my phone says it’s 9°C but according to the tips of my fingers it’s more like 3° or 4°.
09-Apr-2022:
I’m full of admiration for Richard Osman and Graham Norton, who managed to build up their author profiles by developing careers as high profile tv presenters …
09-Apr-2022:
Writing about Smiley’s People for my newsletter seems to have shaken loose some recalcitrant ideas and impressions as to why I took against it so badly all …
07-Apr-2022:
Another one from John Self: three new books — but not first books — from Irish authors, Colin Barrett, Adrian Duncan and Lucy Caldwell 📚
07-Apr-2022:
Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land were both published one hundred years ago. John Self looks at other works from 1922, including Katherine Mansfield’s …
07-Apr-2022:
I was in a bookshop on Tuesday so I got the mass market paperback of Louise Nealon’s Snowflake. I’ll start to read it at the weekend, once I’ve finished my …
07-Apr-2022:
Yesterday’s issue of my newsletter (Talk about books) is about 2 spy novels from the late 1970s, by Graham Greene and John le Carré respectively. Reluctant …
07-Apr-2022:
Somebody I follow on Twitter retweeted Elon Musk. I was so tempted to block him. (Musk, I mean, not the other guy, whose tweets are usually interesting.) But …
06-Apr-2022:
Reluctant defectors: Graham Greene’s The Human Factor and John le Carré’s Smiley’s People Two novels from the late 1970s by “spymasters” Graham Greene and John le Carré show (in rather different ways) the futility, waste, brutality and frustration of …
03-Apr-2022:
Sad that Pete St John has died aged 89. Sadder still that his maudlin, manipulatively heart-tugging ballads couldn’t have gone to the grave with him 🎶
31-Mar-2022:
Finally! I ordered Smiley’s People (paperback) on 21 February. Last week, the seller and I agreed that it had been irretrievably lost in the postal system. I …
27-Mar-2022:
When I wrote in my newsletter about the Jacobean play 🎭The Revenger’s Tragedy a few weeks ago, I concentrated on the subplot, which doesn’t have a tragic …
27-Mar-2022:
I’ve updated a page I keep of short stories that can be read online, to include (again) a link to Niamh Campbell’s prize-winning “Love Many”. I had previously …
26-Mar-2022:
Only cyclists are allowed to hate cyclists and, permitted such license, I will continue to despise myself every time I roll eyes at the fair-weather crew making …
26-Mar-2022:
I said “tab” in this reply, but in fact I don’t use browser tabs: they’re much too neat and organized for my taste. I open web pages in separate windows; one of …
24-Mar-2022:
I actually finished reading Louise Welsh, The Second Cut a few weeks ago but I’m posting this now because I’ve just added a comment to my bookshelf page: I read …
24-Mar-2022:
I recently read all but one of the stories in Kevin Barry’s That Old Country Music in a library ebook. Last night, I read the remaining story in a (printed) …
23-Mar-2022:
The new issue of my newsletter, which I’ve just sent out, is about Candia McWilliam’s 1997 collection of short stories, Wait Till I Tell You 📖
23-Mar-2022:
Candia McWilliam, Wait Till I Tell You Candia McWilliam writes in an oblique style, which sometimes leaves the reader unsure what is supposed to have happened, combined with a very satisfying level …
22-Mar-2022:
Brad Mehldau is “the greatest living jazz pianist now performing”, it says here. Mehldau is great but for my money Enrico Pieranunzi just about shades it. …
21-Mar-2022:
Mail from the UK has become more snail-like. About a month ago, I ordered two books from different booksellers both via Alibris. Both were dispatched on 21 Feb. …
20-Mar-2022:
Yesterday, I added conditional text to my posts template, to insert some boilerplate into newsletter posts. I was pleased with myself for learning how to use …
20-Mar-2022:
In this help topic about including images in posts, @manton says that newsletter emails are not processed by Hugo: instead MB converts the Markdown to HTML and …
19-Mar-2022:
Alexander Larman in The Critic thinks that film director Joe Wright is a sacred cow. I’m barely qualified to comment, having failed to make it all the way …
17-Mar-2022:
The shuffle process, showing impeccable taste, selected two tunes from the same album, twice. Robert Glasper’s Covered and Maria Schneider’s Data Lords …
says …
17-Mar-2022:
I didn’t enjoy the early chapters of 56 Days, where boy (29) meets girl (25) just before pandemic restrictions are imposed: too much of the writing here has the …
13-Mar-2022:
Got it, finally. I’ve updated the Help topic. Here is one of the tidied-up pages: not a “(Dublin Murder Squad, Book 3)” or similar in sight.
13-Mar-2022:
I feel like I’m really close to removing the unwanted garbage in brackets from the titles on my bookshelves but I’m still getting something wrong. Regex gave me …
12-Mar-2022:
Newsletter moves from Substack to Ghost and now I can’t find the RSS feed ☹️. The Whippet
10-Mar-2022:
Twitter suddenly started to show me a Home tab as well as “Latest Tweets”. So, I’ve just deleted the iPad app and I’ll use the web interface instead from now …
09-Mar-2022:
The title of the new issue of my email newsletter, Talk about books, is “Fractured Spaces: Tana French, Faithful Place and Broken Harbour”. It looks at the two …
09-Mar-2022:
Fractured spaces: Tana French, Faithful Place and Broken Harbour In Faithful Place, two separate Dublins poke through the holes in each other; similarly, Broken Harbour features two incompatible locations attempting to occupy …
05-Mar-2022:
I’d have thought that “reverse ransom” implies either that you pay the kidnappers to keep the victim or they pay you to take her/him back. But apparently that’s …
05-Mar-2022:
Machines will do the nasty jobs; human beings the nice ones
it says here: Covid has reset relations between people and robots. I hope the robots are OK with …
05-Mar-2022:
I’ve at last managed to add notes/comments to some of the books on my “Finished reading” shelf, using a data template. Thanks 👏 to @jsonbecker for confirming …
04-Mar-2022:
We don’t write things down to remember them. We write them down to forget.
Ha! That explains why I’ve never been much of a note-taker: I can usually forget …
26-Feb-2022:
Talk about books is now seven issues into its second year. Here’s a recap of what I’ve been posting recently and an indication of my intentions for the next few …
26-Feb-2022:
Hi @manton, I’ve noticed recently that when I moved a book from “Want to read” to “Currently reading” and another one from “Currently reading” to “Finished …
25-Feb-2022:
I think today was my first day this year to be out on the bike 🚲 without gloves. I thought I was going to need them — it was colder then usual this morning — …
23-Feb-2022:
In this issue of Talk about books, I look at The Revenger’s Tragedy (printed in 1607), particularly the (main) subplot, which doesn’t have a tragic ending. “A …
23-Feb-2022:
“A villain not to be forsworn”: The Revenger’s Tragedy A malcontent who is prepared to commit multiple murders to avenge the death of his betrothed, persists in an attempt to corrupt his own sister, with their …
23-Feb-2022:
I’ve been writing my newsletter today, so I’m finally getting around to having my “morning” coffee ☕️ at 5.30 pm. I’m looking forward to lunch, though the sun …
22-Feb-2022:
Hamlet Revenge is Henry Oliver’s Favourite Michael Innes book. Mine too. The Common Reader: Six underrated detective novels 📖
20-Feb-2022:
My various posts about aphantasia and SDAM, the first dozen or so of which originally appeared on Medium in 2018/2019, are now all on this page
18-Feb-2022:
What do you call a comedian who doesn’t make people laugh? A podcaster.
Dorian Lynskey on Why comedians stopped being funny (UnHerd)
17-Feb-2022:
Record Store Day hasn’t adapted to the modern realities of selling physical music, says Rupert Morrison. Time to take a break from it? Record Store Day is …
15-Feb-2022:
I enjoyed Dervla McTiernan’s The Good Turn but if (unlike me) you’re one of those people who think that heavy reliance on coincidence in the plot of a crime …
15-Feb-2022:
I love this suggestion from Ted Gioia that the record labels should develop
a next generation vinyl format. Let’s call it Super-Vinyl. It would have all of the …
13-Feb-2022:
I just finished le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies (2017). I’m very impressed though I have a reservation (limitation period). We find out what Smiley had on Mundt, …
12-Feb-2022:
I’d be most grateful for help from people who know about CSS (and also possibly about Hugo). I’m trying to make a simple theme, which can now be seen on my test …
09-Feb-2022:
The latest issue of Talk about books is “An exemplary case of unacknowledged self-persuasion”: Ian McEwan, Enduring Love. In McEwan’s 1997 novel a successful …
09-Feb-2022:
“An exemplary case of unacknowledged self-persuasion”: Ian McEwan, Enduring Love Ian McEwan’s 1997 novel is (apart from a few chapters) the first-person narrative of Joe Rose, a successful science journalist and popularizer of scientific …
06-Feb-2022:
I forgot to do Wordle yesterday so today I’m on a streak of 1.
04-Feb-2022:
I haven’t listened to or probably even thought about After the Gold Rush for more than 45 years. But since Neil Young has been in the news, I’ve caught myself …
29-Jan-2022:
Some of us, by dint of work, have to be engagé … But if others choose not to be, that isn’t an act of dereliction. It isn’t irrational. It is a subtle and …
29-Jan-2022:
Catherine Flynn on Joyce’s Ulysses in the context of Futurism, Dada and Apollinaire’s surrealism: Ulysses and the international avant-garde of Trieste, Zurich, …
28-Jan-2022:
I just ordered a book published in 1991 though Alibris for €3.19 (€10.87 including postage). The next cheapest copy was €76.89 and they had several in the …
27-Jan-2022:
The Substack editor has a word count now, I read incredulously. Surely it always had one? But no, it’s a new feature. I draft all my posts (even tweets, for the …
27-Jan-2022:
With its short justified lines, this Bloomsbury Quid is hard to read and anyway I’ve got the same story in a more standard format. Still, I’m tempted to hold …
27-Jan-2022:
I hate the way the expression “the wrong side of history” has been making a comeback. I often used it back in the late 70s and early 80s (and maybe into the …
25-Jan-2022:
Did you know who wrote “Nature Boy”? I didn’t. (It’s the opening track on an album I love: Stefano Bollani, Jesper Bodilsen and Morten Lund’s Mi ritorni in …
24-Jan-2022:
Irish police rule out foul play over corpse in post office pension incident
is the headline in The Guardian. Two men were trying to collect the pension of a …
23-Jan-2022:
An infant in its cradle: William Blake’s prophetic serial killers Michael Dibdin’s first US-set novel, Dark Spectre (1995), features a group of serial killers who believe they’re inspired by William Blake. But the resemblances …
23-Jan-2022:
Disappearing ebook
As I mentioned yesterday, I’m rereading John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy. The copy I have is an ebook I bought from Apple (then iBooks) in 2011. At the …
22-Jan-2022:
I’m rereading The Honourable Schoolboy, the only Le Carré I’ve read for more than 40 years, having been put off by Smiley’s People 📚. I’m going to reread …
21-Jan-2022:
Wednesday’s issue of Talk about books is titled An infant in its cradle: William Blake’s prophetic serial killers and it discusses Michael Dibdin’s novel, Dark …
21-Jan-2022:
“There are two things you need to know,” she said. “The first is that Gavin came home yesterday happier than I have seen him in a long time. The second—and you …
20-Jan-2022:
I’ve deleted all the posts and pages that I thought might be causing the problem. Mainly, of course, I’ve deleted Wednesday’s long post with a title, the …
16-Jan-2022:
I’m going to mark the death of Jean-Jacques Beineix by watching Mortel Transfert (2001) again. The title is usually Englished as Mortal Transfer, but “Deadly …
16-Jan-2022:
I dreamt about serial killers and CSS. Probably an unconscious pun on CSI: I finished rereading Red Dragon yesterday and I obviously associate it with William …
15-Jan-2022:
That’s Rai (né Umeed Merchant), narrator of Rushdie’s The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999). As someone with aphantasia and SDAM, I’d like to believe Rai is right …
14-Jan-2022:
One thing I wasn’t expecting about getting old is that I no longer need to shave at precisely 24-hour intervals. So, when to shave has become a conscious …
12-Jan-2022:
How Japan created its own jazz 🎶
10-Jan-2022:
Well, that turned out to be easier than I expected. I’ve now got an automatically generated newsletter archive (based on applying the category “Newsletter” to …
10-Jan-2022:
Wordle 205 5/6
⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜
🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟨🟨🟨⬜
🟩🟩⬜🟩🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
That was a tough one but at least I finished it. Yesterday I had to give up 😳
09-Jan-2022:
I’ve got some details to iron out, but I think I’ve managed to add a description (separate from the Summary) to the heads of my posts with titles (i.e. …
08-Jan-2022:
Wordle 203 3/6
⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜
⬜🟩🟩🟩⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
I was lucky today.
07-Jan-2022:
I enjoy playing Wordle. Ignore the haters.
Helen Lewis. There are Wordle-haters, really? Nobody tells me anything.
07-Jan-2022:
Wordle 202 5/6
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨
🟨🟩🟩🟩⬜
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
First time. I should have got it in 4: I had all the letters then, but overlooked the yellow square from the second …
05-Jan-2022:
The new issue of my newsletter, Talk about books, is out. It’s titled “You’ve got a right to be angry: Salman Rushdie, Fury”. This is the second issue since I …
05-Jan-2022:
You’ve got a right to be angry: Salman Rushdie, Fury Like some of his earlier fiction, notably Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s novel Fury (2001) is driven by anger. But it’s a more diffuse, less directed …
01-Jan-2022:
A few days ago, I discovered this charming, tiny book exchange in an old electricity box near where I live. I was very tempted to take Louise Nealon’s Snowflake …
01-Jan-2022:
At least the weather in 2022 is better than last year’s, so there’s that.
01-Jan-2022:
London Jazz News reports that Nikki Iles has been awarded the BEM — very well deserved 🎹🎶
01-Jan-2022:
Noah Smith, “Six reasons 2021 was a better year than people think” (4 of them restricted to subscribers). Reading his preamble, I saw that 2021 must have seemed …
31-Dec-2021:
I recently read Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant as an ebook borrowed from the library. Knowing I’d want to reread it soon, I ordered a printed copy but, because of …
30-Dec-2021:
Read Charles Cumming, Judas 62. Mission: Impossible meets Smiley’s People. Who said the Cold War is over? Reviewing Box 88, I said it was “a secret, rogue …
30-Dec-2021:
I find that, contrary to the laws of nature, Gillette Fusion blades are actually less expensive in the local pharmacy than in Dunnes, an 18 Km bike ride away. A …
29-Dec-2021:
I think I’ve found an extremely kludgy, horribly inelegant way to add Twitter cards to my newsletter posts on Micro.blog without having to learn how to hack …
29-Dec-2021:
I was starting to think I should proooobably start thinking about finding somewhere to live that wasn’t 300 too many square feet and 500 too many dollars. The …
27-Dec-2021:
Read: Imran Mahmood, I Know What I Saw. The first-person narrative of a long-term homeless man whose memory is damaged and who is sure he witnessed a murder …
24-Dec-2021:
One thing I didn’t like about using Substack for my newsletter is that, if you hover the pointer over a link in an email, instead of seeing the destination URL …
22-Dec-2021:
I’ve just sent out the first issue of Talk about books to be hosted on Micro․blog: “Peter Abrahams’s impaired heroes”. I love this new feature. For the next …
22-Dec-2021:
Peter Abrahams’s impaired heroes Three novels from the mid 2000s by Stephen King’s “favorite American suspense novelist”, featuring protagonists who have the odds stacked against them, even …
18-Dec-2021:
I used <details> and <summary> tags to include two notes in my earlier post about “Marvell and Mortalism” and guess what? NetNewsWire (on both Mac …
18-Dec-2021:
I just posted this on my website: “Marvell and Mortalism: A supplementary note to my essay on ‘A Dialogue between the Soul and Body’”
18-Dec-2021:
Sir Rod Stewart decided to enter a plea to avoid the inconvenience and unnecessary burden on the court and the public that a high profile proceeding would …
17-Dec-2021:
I suppose it would be too much trouble to put the “advance” notice that the cycle path is closed at the bottom of the hill, before we start to climb, rather …
16-Dec-2021:
I’d love to hear Kenny Barron and Dado Moroni but I’m not going to London just to do so. I expect it will turn up on Radio 3 at some point. There’s a wonderful …
16-Dec-2021:
I’ve just had an email from the library to tell me that the ebook of Charles Cumming’s Judas 62 has become available a month earlier than expected. So looking …
15-Dec-2021:
As Martin Amis once wrote of his good friend: “He thinks like a child; he writes like a distinguished author; and he speaks like a genius”.
From Tomiwa …
15-Dec-2021:
John Naughton mentions “In the beginning was the command line”, which remains the only thing I’ve read by Neal Stephenson. In 1999, it persuaded me to adopt, …
14-Dec-2021:
So, any ideas which author the next issue of my newsletter should be about?
14-Dec-2021:
I enjoyed this post by Anne Trubek about getting out of academia and into publishing. I started my doctorate too late, and took too long to finish it, ever to …
13-Dec-2021:
Toby Litt is starting a writer’s diary on Substack in the new year. It’s $50 a year, but there’s a 100% discount (reducing the annual cost to, eh, zero) if you …
12-Dec-2021:
This post is for people who are following the RSS feed of Talk about books. That feed now includes all my Micro.blog posts. To get only the posts for the …
12-Dec-2021:
I had a bit of a wobble about moving “Talk about books” from Substack when I realized that each current subscriber will be asked to confirm — an …
12-Dec-2021:
I just finished reading The Buried Giant. I enjoyed it better than anything else I’ve read by Ishiguro, including Never Let Me Go. (I haven’t read Klara yet.) …
12-Dec-2021:
I really don’t want to learn Hugo. I’ve been trying to create an archive page, based on the category “newsletter” (which will automatically be assigned to posts …
09-Dec-2021:
I’ve upgraded to a premium subscription on Micro.blog and, all going well, I’m going to move Talk about books over from Substack. I’ve a few things to work out, …
09-Dec-2021:
The latest issue of my Talk about books newsletter is about Andrew Marvell’s poem, “A Dialogue between the Soul and Body”. The previous issue discussed 9 crime …
09-Dec-2021:
The previous post was kind of a test. I wanted to see what would happen if I used <cite> tags in a post. They had no effect in the timeline but the book …
09-Dec-2021:
Last week I began to reread Milton’s God. I haven’t made quick progress: Empson’s argument is dense and typically idiosyncratic, but I’ll keep at it. I thought …
08-Dec-2021:
This is what I was eating yesterday evening as the storm raged outside: canard à l’orage
08-Dec-2021:
I’m listening to Esbjörn Svensson Trio Live in Hamburg (2007) for the first time in at least a couple of years, maybe much longer. I had persuaded myself that I …
08-Dec-2021:
I’m supposed to be writing my newsletter today, so I’ve tinkered with the Hugo theme of my Micro.blog to add a link to my Bookshelves page just below the …
08-Dec-2021:
John Naughton, who owns a Tesla, characterizes Elon Musk as “three-parts genius and one part fruitcake”. A bit like Dryden’s “to madness near allied”, I …
08-Dec-2021:
To prove I can be ruthless, these are the only editions of Marvell’s poetry that I’m keeping. To be honest, I’m not sure I need both first (hardback, 2003) and …
07-Dec-2021:
The overflow carpark is seriously overflowing this morning.
07-Dec-2021:
I’m not watching You Don’t Know Me on BBC1. The library has the ebook but it’s not available till March, so instead I’ve reserved Imran Mahmood’s next book, I …
07-Dec-2021:
Ted Gioia writes that, when Czesław Miłosz wasn’t allowed back into the US, his wife Janka Miłosz
… angrily confronted a bureaucrat at the State Department, …
06-Dec-2021:
Chris Noth on The Good Wife’s Peter Florrick:
“I don’t feel any connection to [it]. It’s odd, because I know it was well received. I have an emotional void …
06-Dec-2021:
The inclusion of Danielle McLaughlin’s novel, The Art of Falling, in John Self’s pick of the year’s fiction in The Critic, reminds me that I’ve been meaning to …
03-Dec-2021:
It wasn’t until I’d read more than half of the series that I began to see the pattern: he gradually but perceptibly becomes less conscientious and less law …
01-Dec-2021:
I found the pdf copy of my 2016 piece in Essays in Criticism, “Andrew Marvell’s Gender”. I still had the proof (also pdf) but I’d given up hope of finding the …
01-Dec-2021:
One reason I hate streaming and music download services is that the metadata is rarely clean. Seems the same may be true of some book data used by Bookshelves. …
30-Nov-2021:
I’ve had another go at customizing a Hugo theme but, as before, I’m finding that I can do most of what I want simply by editing the CSS. I’m having problems …
30-Nov-2021:
That’s the 3rd day in a row I’ve had to reboot the MacBook Air to force it to sync with iCloud — and this time it didn’t even work. I seem to be permanently …
30-Nov-2021:
A tweet with 1000 likes and 17 angry vicious replies will still look like a dumpster fire, even though almost everyone liked it!
In How to fix Twitter, Noah …
29-Nov-2021:
So, here is the explanation I promised as to why Literal.club is not for me. I don’t need an alternative to Goodreads: I’m happier when I’m not keeping track of …
29-Nov-2021:
The upshot is I’ve no longer had it with Apple and I’m no longer (particularly) glad that I resisted the temptation to get an M1 MacBook Air!
29-Nov-2021:
Rebooting cleared the logjam, I’m pleased to say. But that’s the second time I’ve rebooted in 24 hours. I hope I’m not going to have to do this every day.
29-Nov-2021:
Well, I got my missing iCloud folders back but the Mac has again stopped syncing with iCloud. It says it’s uploading and downloading “items” but at 0Kb/sec. …
28-Nov-2021:
I finished reading Andrew Taylor, The King’s Evil, the third in a series set in Restoration London but the first I’ve read. I’m not going to write about it till …
28-Nov-2021:
OK, this worked: I unchecked iCloud Drive in Finder preferences, rebooted the MacBook Air, and then rechecked iCloud Drive. It took a minute or so to refresh …
28-Nov-2021:
Help! Last week, my MacBook Air wouldn’t sync with iCloud, so I signed out of iCloud and then back in. Now, some folders on iCloud, including Web, containing …
27-Nov-2021:
I had my booster yesterday followed by a restless night but I think that had as much to do with the high winds and rain as with the vaccine. Thanks to said wind …
26-Nov-2021:
I was racking my brains trying to remember Bruno Bettelheim’s name this morning and it just wouldn’t come. I kept thinking “Brigid Brophy”. Right initials, …
26-Nov-2021:
A tweet from Adam Roberts yesterday, comparing the volumes of two collections of Basil Bunting’s poetry (the smaller of the two titled Complete Poems) sent me …
24-Nov-2021:
In the latest issue of Talk about books, I attempt to deal with an entire series of detective novels in a single post. In the end, I had to skip two (Medusa and …
24-Nov-2021:
After my previous post, I tried logging the Mac out of iCloud and logging back in again. Fingers crossed.
24-Nov-2021:
Since I upgrated to Monterey, my Mac won’t sync with iCloud, and it’s extremely frustrating. I also upgraded to iCloud+ so I could use iCloud email with my own …
23-Nov-2021:
Three book reviews that I originally posted on Literal.club. (Charles Cumming, Box 88; Louise O’Neill, After the Silence; and Michael Connelly, The Law of …
23-Nov-2021:
I get really annoyed when I Google the distance from one place to another and I’m told it’s “a 5-minute drive” or “only a short taxi journey”. How do I convert …
23-Nov-2021:
The Wheel of Time is the latest fantasy to plunder Irish culture. Are we okay with that?
I don’t see why not — we weren’t using it 😜
21-Nov-2021:
I’m likely to add two paid subscription levels to Talk about books newsletter: PDF and print editions.
21-Nov-2021:
I think I’m going to delete my Literal.club account. I’ve no desire to track my reading, or to rate or review books. I like my choice of things to read to be …
20-Nov-2021:
… a political writer convinced that political dogma (of any sort) is inimical to writing itself … the country’s most popular writer who holds some of our least …
19-Nov-2021:
I’m reading the 4th in a row of 5 of Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen novels 📖 that I’m going to write about in next week’s newsletter. I wonder if that explains …
18-Nov-2021:
And, speaking about toggles in iOS/iPadOS, I’d love a quick (instant!) way to switch smart quotes on and off. As I’ve said before, I usually want curly quotes …
18-Nov-2021:
I wish iOS and iPadOS had a way to toggle “select mode” on and off. I’m fed up trying to position the insertion point precisely only to find that I’ve selected …
18-Nov-2021:
I haven’t read all of this WSJ piece because paywall but the accessible part suggests wired headphones are back because AirPods are “too widespread to be cool”, …
18-Nov-2021:
the press release/back cover copy genre does what I spent decades telling undergraduates not to do: it turns the concrete vague, it generalizes at the expense …
17-Nov-2021:
I just opened the Maps app for the first time since I upgraded to macOS Monterey about three weeks ago and … everything is clearer, sharper, more detailed and …
17-Nov-2021:
I just renewed my .ie domain name for a fourth year, so I guess I must be serious about it. I haven’t been posting a lot there recently as my Substack …
13-Nov-2021:
I just posted A year of “Talk about books” (already). Seriously, a year? The rate at which time is accelerating is increasing. Exponentially.
12-Nov-2021:
I’ve been noticing recently that some pages on my site (hosted on GitHub Pages) don’t fully load, or at least aren’t fully “painted” on the screen. Refreshing …
12-Nov-2021:
The book Antifragile is pretty bad. Like most popular management books, it’s a single useful idea padded out with anecdotes.
I haven’t read the book but …
12-Nov-2021:
I’m pleasantly surprised that, among the books I chose last year to rescue from a French attic, are the second and third volumes of Len Jackson’s Foundations of …
11-Nov-2021:
I intend to reread 5 novels in Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen series over the next 13 days, to write about them in the next issue of my newsletter: Cabal, Dead …
10-Nov-2021:
The 26th fortnightly issue of Talk about books, which has just gone out, is about Lucy Caldwell’s 2016 collection of short stories, Multitudes 📖
09-Nov-2021:
I thought I’d missed the opportunity to see Enrico Pieranunzi (with Jasper Somsen and Jorge Rossy) at Koa jazz festival in Montpellier; but the performance has …
06-Nov-2021:
I did worse than I expected on this Kristen/Kirsten/Kristin/Kyrsten quiz, with a score of 5 out of 12. Got both Senators wrong, but Stewart, Bell and Dunst all …
06-Nov-2021:
I never really understood Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility”. I now know that’s because what I’m able to recollect isn’t emotion but something …
04-Nov-2021:
“To mitigate the issue with Snipping Tool, use the Print Screen key on your keyboard and paste the screenshot into your document,” recommends Microsoft. “You …
04-Nov-2021:
I took a photo on my phone, and uploaded it to iCloud, intending to edit it on the Mac. 25 minutes later, it still hasn’t shown up on iCloud in the Finder. …
04-Nov-2021:
Among the very limited selection of books that I had sent back from France were two different editions of The Changeling: the New Mermaid one, ed. Joost …
02-Nov-2021:
I’ve finally recovered those books that had spent the last 10 years in my sister’s attic in the south of France that I wasn’t willing to abandon, so I think I’m …
31-Oct-2021:
I was taught art by Patrick McGoohan’s sister at a secondary modern school in Hounslow. I’ve taken a Danger Man approach to pictures even since.
Elvis Costello …
30-Oct-2021:
I’ve been reading and writing about Andrew Marvell on and off over the past 25 years and I think the thing about him that I’m most satisfied to have learned …
29-Oct-2021:
Well, I got Windows 11 installed and I find that the taskbar is fixed at the bottom of the screen, and can’t be moved. I’ve no objection in principle to …
29-Oct-2021:
I’m downloading Windows 11. It took just over 2 hours to get to 99% (with the speed fluctuating dramatically). It’s been on the last 1% for ten minutes 🤷🏻♂️
29-Oct-2021:
Lucy Caldwell’s “All the people were mean and bad” won the BBC National Short Story Award. A woman and her 21-month-old daughter, on a 7-hour flight home from …
29-Oct-2021:
Dropbox has gradually grown in unpopularity on the Mac it demands all sorts of access (effectively, root) that people are wary about.
The Overspill. That’s why …
28-Oct-2021:
I just got from the library You Love Me, Caroline Kepnes’s 3rd book featuring repeat murderer Joe Goldberg. It looks from this Slate story as if the makers of …
27-Oct-2021:
Substack has been adding new “tools for writers”. What interests me most is the one for embedding files, including PDFs. I’ll think about including a PDF …
27-Oct-2021:
This issue of Talk about books newsletter is out and it’s about Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a book I found disappointing when I first read it more …
26-Oct-2021:
Well, I zapped my Medium account: it’s gone for good. I hadn’t been able to set up redirects for my old “blog” subdomain, so those links are broken. My busiest …
26-Oct-2021:
For me, the hard choice in question 2 here is clearly between options 2 and 3. I’ve finally come down on the side of 2 but if you’d asked me an arbitrary number …
25-Oct-2021:
Every now and then, I get the notion that I ought to read something else by Arthur Phillips (having so far read only his first novel, Prague) but to date I …
24-Oct-2021:
Terence Eden has a post on his blog today about problems with footnotes on WordPress. That prompts me to resurrect my post from 3 years ago about avoiding …
24-Oct-2021:
I have this 5-year-old Bluetooth Boombar, that I’ve generally used with an iPod Touch, but now the battery is starting to go. So, I tried plugging an even older …
24-Oct-2021:
I found out yesterday that the Brad Mehldau Trio is playing the National Concert Hall on 3 Nov — and it was already sold out by the time I heard. So …
24-Oct-2021:
Here’s Mike Collins’s review of the new Marcin Wasilewski Trio album, En attendant. I was afraid at first that I’d been given short measure, but the album’s …
24-Oct-2021:
An album by Enrico Pieranunzi, Thomas Fonnesbaek and Ulysses Owens Jr includes a version of a very popular standard under the title “Alt kan ske” (YouTube …
23-Oct-2021:
I’ve been neglecting my Short stories on the web page, I’m sorry to say. I just updated it for the first time since December 2020, with two-not-one new stories: …
23-Oct-2021:
I keep a page that lists the 19 or so posts about aphantasia and SDAM that I’ve written since April 2018. It occurred to me yesterday that the newsletter issue …
23-Oct-2021:
The Common Reader’s Henry Oliver is Not quite against alcohol, and neither am I. I’ve become a temporary nondrinker during the pandemic, but I don’t like to …
23-Oct-2021:
… a detestable man of extraordinary contradictions … someone who even Steve Bannon pronounces too extreme in his beliefs and intentions for the Trump White …
23-Oct-2021:
I was chatting on Teams yesterday to someone at work who mentioned the need to “eliminate efficiencies”. I think I’ve always been good at that.
23-Oct-2021:
It was this that lost it for the Sun.
Enjoyable piece of flash fiction from Adam Roberts (whose Purgatory Mount📖 has just come out in paperback): Earth versus …
23-Oct-2021:
People often complain that Medium hijacks text selection for highlighting, quote-tweeting, commenting etc. I’ve noticed that in Safari on iOS and iPad this …
22-Oct-2021:
This arrived in the post yesterday: the first book by Nobel winner Abdulrazak Gurnah that I’ve owned, or indeed seen. As well as the introduction, Gurnah wrote …
22-Oct-2021:
I suppose the inescapable implication of Douglas Adams’s well known riff on technology is that we can’t avoid getting more suspicious of and bewildered by …
22-Oct-2021:
It’s such a tedious cliché when someone is described as “socially liberal but economically conservative”: without liberal economics, you can’t pay for …
22-Oct-2021:
Since I said that I’m not going to be posting on Medium any more, I continue to get new followers but no new views/reads (to be expected as there’s nothing …
21-Oct-2021:
Getting around to my “afternoon coffee” (a term of Art) at last. (It’s 21:50 here). Actually wondering if I should skip it for today.
21-Oct-2021:
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has died. I’d barely heard of him and haven’t read anything he wrote but I nevertheless referred to him in a post: In defence of flow: A …
21-Oct-2021:
I deleted my Facebook and Amazon accounts; I still use Google for search but zapped my Google account (having used Gmail as my main email provider for 15 …
21-Oct-2021:
I’ve been thinking again about RSS and find that I’m even more convinced than I was when I wrote this post last year that RSS shouldn’t be a separate thing from …
20-Oct-2021:
I’m not sure about Metaverse, but I’m definitely Facebook-averse.
20-Oct-2021:
Salman Rushdie has posted a new short story on Substack. Whimsical, perhaps would-be Borgesian and undoubtedly timey-wimey, it features a (temporary) visitor …
19-Oct-2021:
I got an email from Tesco Mobile (my former phone service provider), saying they owed me a small refund and attaching a PDF purporting to include a barcode I …
18-Oct-2021:
This is my final post on Medium, unless I change my mind again. I’ve enjoyed writing there but I’m going to focus on Substack (Talk about books) and my static …
17-Oct-2021:
Yesterday, I was complaining that I couldn’t set up iCloud email wiith a custom domain address because there was something wrong with my SPF record. Turns out, …
17-Oct-2021:
I’ve moved all the Medium posts that I wanted to keep to my static site and I don’t intend to post on Medium in future. I retained the ugly Medium URLs and …
16-Oct-2021:
I’m trying to set up iCloud mail with a custom domain, but I keep being told to check my SPF record. It looks fine to me, and I’ve tried deleting and recreating …
16-Oct-2021:
As a teenager many decades ago, I meant to read Under the Volcano but somehow never got around to it. I just discovered that it quotes Marvell’s “Clorinda and …
15-Oct-2021:
Wednesday’s issue of Talk about books (about Kazuo Ishiguro’s short stories in Nocturnes) contained a link to my post from 2019 discussing Never Let Me Go …
14-Oct-2021:
I think it’s time Talk about books revisited Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad. I had separate posts about the first 2 novels (of 6 in the series) early on. The …
14-Oct-2021:
I often complain about the slapdash metadata associated with music streaming and downloads. I just had to redownload Nathalie Loriers New Trio’s album, Les 3 …
14-Oct-2021:
The last time I bought an album by Terje Gewelt was over 10 years ago. It was Oslo (2009), with E Pieranunzi on piano, and I got it from iTunes because CD …
14-Oct-2021:
The top ten publications on Substack collectively make more than $20 million a year in subscription revenue, while less popular newsletters typically make tens …
13-Oct-2021:
The latest issue of Talk about books newsletter has just gone out. It’s mainly about Kazuo Ishiguro’s collection of 5 short stories, Nocturnes. Next issue in 2 …
11-Oct-2021:
There were several things I was unhappy with on Google+, including the way it handled links and the inflexibly regular grid layout. When Google announced its …
11-Oct-2021:
Wednesday’s issue of Talk about books is going to be (primarily) about Kazuo Ishiguro’s short stories in Nocturnes. In the meantime, here’s the mini-review that …
11-Oct-2021:
Substack discovery: literature
Substack’s “Discover” page can be reached in one of two ways: either straight from the home page or from the Reader at https://reader.substack.com/discover. In …
10-Oct-2021:
No, it’s Andrew Hill. Cedar Walton 🎹 🎶
10-Oct-2021:
I’m enjoying the Marcin Wasilewski trio’s performance of “Riders on the Storm” so much that I’ll never listen to The Doors’ version again. Mind you, I wouldn’t …
10-Oct-2021:
Brexit Destroyed Labour Party, Not Corbyn, it says here. Actually, I’m pretty sure that Brexit at least contributed to Corbyn’s destruction too.
09-Oct-2021:
I wish Esbjörn Svensson Trio had made a live album of the music from Seven Days of Falling. Live in London includes “Mingle in the Mincing Machine” and …
09-Oct-2021:
Usually, for a book this good, this well written, this artful, I would extol it and exhort you, I would send copies to people, I would quote and quote and …
09-Oct-2021:
Spying as a summer job, between A-Levels and university: Charles Cumming’s Box 88 📚
07-Oct-2021:
So, I just ordered the Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie (paperback), edited by Abdulrazak Gurnah. I’ll read some of Gurnah’s fiction soon but I thought …
07-Oct-2021:
I’m so glad I cancelled my subscription to the NYT last year, because now I can’t give in to the temptation to read that long “Bad Art Friend” story. I know I …
07-Oct-2021:
It’s 30 years this month since I gave up legal practice. Last night I dreamt that a batch of personal injury cases had been found in which I’d allowed the …
06-Oct-2021:
Kennys’ Bookshop has a new search facility and it’s a lot faster (and, on first impression, more comprehensive) than the old one. If you want to buy from a real …
06-Oct-2021:
Lennie Briscoe was one of my favourite characters on Law & Order. I didn’t know that Jerry Orbach, who played the role, and his first wife, writer Marta …
04-Oct-2021:
I was sure I’d never previously read Brian Moore’s Catholics, about which I posted yesterday. But writing about the ending, and finding the cover image, have …
04-Oct-2021:
The current issue of my newsletter (Talk about books) is about women on the run in novels by Lisa Lutz and Laura Lippman. The next one (due 13 Oct) might be …
04-Oct-2021:
I just learned by browsing Substack that Freddie deBoer thinks The Matrix (1999) is rubbish, while Ross Douthat insists it’s good. That’s all the confirmation I …
03-Oct-2021:
I just posted something about Brian Moore’s 1972 novella, Catholics. Now, back to Ishiguro’s Nocturnes but, first, my “morning” coffee 📖☕️
02-Oct-2021:
One thing I prefer on the Mac to the iPad: I can leave “smart quotes” on as default, and get “straight quotes” when I need them with a keyboard …
30-Sep-2021:
I’ve never used Keynote and very rarely use Numbers but I’ve just gone and downloaded updates to both. Indeed, these days I can go for months without even …
30-Sep-2021:
The newsletter (Talk about books) is due out every other Wednesday, but I held it till this morning so I could read it over with rested eyes. Then I overslept. …
29-Sep-2021:
I hadn’t had a keyboard with a numeric keypad for a long time until I got a Windows desktop late last year. Only a few days ago, it finally occurred to me that …
28-Sep-2021:
As I was reordering my book review posts, I was reminded of this from 6 years ago, about Andrew Taylor’s The Anatomy of Ghosts. I think I need to do a …
28-Sep-2021:
I reordered the book reviews (none recent) on my reviews page into alphabetical order by author surname. I wonder should I arrange by title the posts that have …
28-Sep-2021:
Don’t say you weren’t given fair warning. This is from John Naughton, quoting The Guardian.
26-Sep-2021:
I’m trying out the Safari Technology Preview, as John Gruber recommends before installing Safari 15. It seems fine so far. I never use tabs anyway: one of the …
26-Sep-2021:
I haven’t got a fixed internet connection here so I connect through my phone. Before I had an iPhone, I had to recharge the phone’s battery 2 or 3 times a day …
26-Sep-2021:
I was just trying to write a short note about Brian Moore’s 1972 novella, 📖Catholics📚 when it struck me that I might have been misreading it and that it may …
26-Sep-2021:
JSTOR is so frustrating! It won’t let Keychain suggest a strong password, or automatically store a password once created (you can add it manually to Keychain …
25-Sep-2021:
This is what I have to say about Philip Kerr’s early novel, A Philosophical Investigation. It’s rather more than I was expecting, given the difficulty I’ve …
24-Sep-2021:
Spotify and music streaming generally want to keep a fraudulent payment system in place because they benefit from it, as do the fraudsters, of course, according …
23-Sep-2021:
Felicia C Sullivan writes about her bridge book, the novel Follow Me into the Dark, which I discussed in my newsletter last month 📖
21-Sep-2021:
“Musk thinks Peter [Thiel] is a sociopath, and Peter thinks Musk is a fraud and a braggart.”
They’re both, of course, very perceptive people and good judges of …
21-Sep-2021:
“You can now embed NFTs in your Substack posts …” Finally! Exactly the feature I’ve been waiting for with bated breath. (Excuse the sarcasm, I got a bit carried …
20-Sep-2021:
According to my ebook app (BorrowBox) I’m now on page 141 of 140 🤷♂️
20-Sep-2021:
Pianist Emil Viklicky remembers bassist George Mraz who died last week. As I’ve said before, Viklicky is not one of my favourite pianists but I often listen to …
20-Sep-2021:
The Irish Times books quiz is unusually easy today. I still got one wrong, though.
19-Sep-2021:
I just read a longish Substack post in NetNewsWire, wanted to ”like” it, so I opened the web page and regretted that I hadn’t read the whole post on the web. It …
19-Sep-2021:
Dave Gelly reviews with enthusiasm Chick Corea’s Akoustic Band Live. I have 2 previous albums by this trio (one live, one studio) that I don’t listen to enough. …
19-Sep-2021:
I love Tot but I’m finding its erratic behaviour frustrating. I accidentally deleted a note on my phone (no idea how) and neither shaking nor 3-finger swipe …
18-Sep-2021:
I’ve had more feedback on my Frankenstein post than on any previous issue of the newsletter and all of it favourable so far. So, naturally, I’m now worrying …
18-Sep-2021:
Somebody just commented on an old post of mine about motivation, productivity and aphantasia, recommending Obsidian. I’ve seen plenty of discussion of Obsidian …
18-Sep-2021:
I just went to turn off autocorrect on my iPad, only to find out that I already did that months ago. It still highlights misspelt words when I try to edit them, …
18-Sep-2021:
Help! The version of Carla Bley’s “Vashkar” on the new Marcin Wasilewski album is ruining those on Arctic Riff for me 🎶 🎹
17-Sep-2021:
Recent mentions of Herbie Hancock on Twitter have sent me back to the album 🎶Herbie Hancock Trio 81🎹, which I haven’t listened to for years. I’m starting to …
16-Sep-2021:
First impressions of Marcin Wasilewski Trio’s En attendant: at 43 mins, it seems insubstantial; and I much prefer their “Riders on the Storm” to The Doors’ 🎶🎹
15-Sep-2021:
The next issue of the newsletter, in 2 weeks’ time, is likely to be about “fugitive women” and to feature Laura Lippman’s Sunburn📚 and Lisa Lutz’s The …
15-Sep-2021:
I just got an email from the company I buy my coffee from, saying that Lavazza are putting their prices up, but not (unless I’m missing something) by how much. …
15-Sep-2021:
The latest issue of Talk about books (newsletter on Substack) has just gone out. It’s Creature and creator in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I loved writing it …
14-Sep-2021:
“I’ll put it on my reading list.”
Might do better actually to read it. Alan Jacobs — @ayjay — recommends Richard Dawkins, improbable though that might sound: …
13-Sep-2021:
Microsoft has been messing about with Windows Paint again. When are they going to learn? I had to set a new Registry key to get it even to run, and now it takes …
12-Sep-2021:
Yesterday, I posted something on my static site that, at any time over the previous 4 months, I’d have posted on Medium. Posting on the static site is …
11-Sep-2021:
This is the first thing I’ve posted on my own site since May. I had been posting to Medium (using a custom domain name) in the meantime, but that experiment is …
11-Sep-2021:
The more I look at the draft I have on the Mac, the more I see that it’s a very early draft, missing edits that I made nearly an hour ago. The iPad must have …
11-Sep-2021:
Not only did I lose the last paragraph, but edits that I’d made to earlier paragraphs also didn’t survive. I thought Tot had versions, so that I could go back …
11-Sep-2021:
I really need to be careful when switching between the iPad and the Mac. I just lost the last paragraph of something I’d been writing in Tot on the iPad when I …
10-Sep-2021:
I’m not consistent in choosing filenames (slugs) for posts on my website. Sometimes I’ll use an initial capital for proper names because it’s allowed: the names …
10-Sep-2021:
I just found out that there’s a new Marcin Wasilewski Trio album out today, 🎹En Attendant🎶. I’ve ordered the CD direct from the ECM website. Now playing their …
08-Sep-2021:
Sean O’Neill argues that the significance of Sally Rooney’s Irishness hasn’t been given the attention it deserves. He makes a good, if overstated, case. It …
08-Sep-2021:
The phrase “vanilla JavaScript” has lost none of its power to irritate the hell out of me. Why are tech people so bad at knowing what to call things? Other …
08-Sep-2021:
Problematically, Substack does not identify which authors are part of the Substack Pro programme.
Yeah, that’s capitalism for you. Very few businesses …
07-Sep-2021:
Before I deleted my Google account, I had been artkavanagh@gmail.com for 15 years. I regularly got emails — one concerning someone’s mental health and several …
06-Sep-2021:
That’s twice in one day I’ve come across (unrelated) references to Howard Carter and Tutankhamun’s tomb. Coincidence? Almost certainly.
06-Sep-2021:
I’m back doing my own coffee-grinding for the foreseeable. I cycled to Castlebar Aldi on Friday to stock up on their ground espresso but there was none left so …
06-Sep-2021:
When I was writing last week’s issue of the newsletter (about the Jackson Brodie series) I forgot to include a link to something I’d written before, about Kate …
05-Sep-2021:
I write most things that are intended for my own site in nonstandard but valid Markdown, i.e. mainly “plain” text with html tags where necessary. I was using iA …
05-Sep-2021:
Innocence, ignorance or complicity (Kazuo Ishiguro) 📚
Ishiguro’s new novel provides the opportunity to take a second look at Kathy from Never Let Me Go I haven’t read Kazuo Ishiguro’s very recent novel, Klara and …
04-Sep-2021:
The latest issue of my Substack newsletter is about Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series of novels. I expect to feature another of her books, Transcription, in …
04-Sep-2021:
Four months ago, I resumed paying the Medium membership fee to get a custom domain name and hoping for better recommendations. But the quality of items in my …
04-Sep-2021:
One thing (of very many) that annoys me about Google is that, if I click a search result and then follow a few more links from there, the only way I can get …
04-Sep-2021:
I detest websites that make the fan start up on my (Intel) MacBook Air. LinkedIn is one of them if I leave it open too long. That in itself might be a good …
04-Sep-2021:
This WSJ story is the first of the many pieces I’ve read on the Supreme Court’s order on the Texas abortion law to explain the issues in terms that I could …
03-Sep-2021:
I just joined literal.club where my username is @artkavanagh (as it is almost everywhere except Twitter). I deleted my Goodreads account some time ago, so I …
03-Sep-2021:
… perhaps there are no new forms – of writing, of personal connection, of belief in something that gives meaning to the world. Perhaps there is nothing for it …
02-Sep-2021:
The most recent issue of my newsletter, Talk about books, is about Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels. I’ve been wanting to write about them for some time 📚
31-Aug-2021:
I just deactivated my Reddit account. I never really felt I belonged there. Interestingly, a deactivated account is not recoverable, while other platforms offer …
31-Aug-2021:
I’ve used autocomplete in preference to bookmarks in my browser since autocomplete started. I visit Charles Arthur’s The Overspill almost every weekday. So, …
29-Aug-2021:
I don’t usually like “very short stories” or flash fiction because, too often, there just isn’t room for the story, or even a story. But I always make an …
28-Aug-2021:
TIL that Rupert Holmes, who wrote the novel on which Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies🎬 is based, is also responsible for “The Piña Colada Song”. I’m utterly …
28-Aug-2021:
Richard Williams, reviewing Marc Johnson’s solo bass album, Overpass, points out that Charlie Haden, “who recorded many times in a duo setting,” never made a …
27-Aug-2021:
I just wasted a chunk of the afternoon trying to persuade a mod on r/books that I ought to be able to include a link in a discussion post. It seems that the …
27-Aug-2021:
Here’s an interesting view on Sally Rooney’s novels as a “shameless reassertion of white individualism”. Rooney clearly sees economic class, not race, as the …
26-Aug-2021:
Rock musicians aspire to have jazz credibility – even Ginger Baker called himself a jazz drummer, for God’s sake.
This cracked me up: an acerbic aside from …
25-Aug-2021:
This is my favourite Charlie Watts story 🎶🎹
24-Aug-2021:
Twitter … satisfies our yearning for an aphorism of banality … an aphorism that closes down rather than discloses …
I enjoyed Adam Roberts’s review of Patricia …
23-Aug-2021:
I often use Dir$() in VBA in my day job, to batch process folders of Word documents. But it doesn’t handle subfolders. For years I’ve put off learning an …
22-Aug-2021:
My newsletter, Talk about books, has now reached its 20th fortnightly issue, which means it’s been running for 38 weeks. I just posted a summary of issues 14 to …
22-Aug-2021:
In the current issue of my newsletter, I make the case that ambivalence about justice is more or less universal, arising from our reason/observation/experience …
19-Aug-2021:
I hadn’t seen any of The Good Fight📺 since season 2, but I just caught an episode from season 5 and it’s an utter travesty. It felt more like Ally McBeal than …
18-Aug-2021:
The new issue of Talk about books, my newsletter, is titled Your favourite author’s ambivalence about justice. In 2 weeks’ time I’ll be writing about Kate …
18-Aug-2021:
Alan Jacobs (@ayjay) about rationalists:
they’re about “overcoming bias,” about eliminating subjectivity – cognitive errors to them are always about …
18-Aug-2021:
Couldn’t keep my eyes open at 7.30pm yesterday, so I lay down for a late siesta and woke up after midnight. I didn’t want to cook dinner at that hour, so worked …
18-Aug-2021:
Facebook (and in some aspects of their business, Google and Amazon) are the robber barons of the information technology era. That’s how they got so rich.
17-Aug-2021:
Is Dark Spectre (1996) a riposte to Red Dragon (1981)? Thomas Harris’s Francis Dolarhyde kills because of delusions about William Blake. Michael Dibdin suggests …
15-Aug-2021:
Parts of the internet — Medium, GitHub, om.co, the Irish Times — seem to be out today, or at best very sluggish, while other parts — including Micro.blog — are …
15-Aug-2021:
I just posted this on Medium Reverse chronological order? Trying to stop some posts from going out of date
12-Aug-2021:
Medium has broken the Back button. It happens when you’re on somebody’s profile page, click on the “Read more” link under a snippet, and then try to get back to …
09-Aug-2021:
I’m reading Kate Atkinson’s 📖Big Sky (2019) at last and thoroughly enjoying it. The next-but-one issue of the newsletter is probably going to be about her …
09-Aug-2021:
How on earth did they manage to design the USB-A connection so that you always try it the wrong way around first? It’s impressive (if malicious) 😈
09-Aug-2021:
Charles Arthur (the Overspill) says “we are starting to think that reviews really aren’t a good metric for anything”, but honestly I came to that conclusion at …
07-Aug-2021:
But, while he himself would never have taken the extreme measure of slaughtering his loved ones to keep them from coming over uninvited, once someone else does …
07-Aug-2021:
I’ve reordered the book discussion section of my home page to list the posts in alphabetical order by author surname instead of reverse chronological order as …
07-Aug-2021:
Late autumn has come early this year. I seem to have completely missed early autumn, which is annoying 😡
06-Aug-2021:
Alexandro Chen, “Hired to do nothing”, a short story told from the point of view of a man who, on a whim, offers a service for which he doesn’t expect there to …
06-Aug-2021:
How did we build a machine that rewards people for being the dumbest, snarkiest, most kneejerk tribal versions of themselves? And why am I using it???
Helen …
06-Aug-2021:
It seems that the third book in Dervla McTiernan’s Cormac Reilly series, The Good Turn📚, will finally be available in paperback at the end of this month. Oh, …
05-Aug-2021:
Glad they’ve got this (almost) sorted out. UK musicians to be able to tour visa-free in 19 EU countries
04-Aug-2021:
Sophie Hannah tries to explain why so many readers/critics etc think that Agatha Christie wasn’t a very good writer. I’m sure she’s partly right but I think …
04-Aug-2021:
I was in the supermarket, and Dido’s “Here with Me” was playing and I realized for the first time that it’s a completely different song from “White Flag”. OK, …
04-Aug-2021:
There’s another issue of my newsletter, Talk about books, just out. It’s about Felicia C Sullivan’s 2017 novel, Follow Me into the Dark. More in 2 weeks 📖
04-Aug-2021:
John made me outline my self-image. In brief: my best efforts always fail and I must punish myself into being better. He was horrified. I thought everyone felt …
04-Aug-2021:
It’s usually said that the users are the product, but they aren’t even that: they’re the conduit for the product, which is data.
Yup. From Snakes and Ladders
03-Aug-2021:
Future Tense editor Torie Bosch set out to praise Microsoft Word, but ended up excoriating Google Docs. I used to be enthusiastic about Word but every time I …
03-Aug-2021:
Martin Hiesboeck is frustrated at the way Taiwan is seen from Europe and believes there’s a lot that Taiwan could do to improve the position: Seeing Taiwan from …
02-Aug-2021:
This bookshop in Louisburgh, County Mayo, opened 5 years ago and I’ve been meaning to visit ever since, but of course it’s been closed for over a year. On …
01-Aug-2021:
This morning I read for the first time a post from Jan 2020 by Ryan Langdon about his shock on learning that some people don’t have an internal monologue. It …
31-Jul-2021:
Economics Substacker Noah Smith is very good on the topic of Twitter. I think I previously posted a link to The Terrific Triviality of Twitter. Now he’s …
31-Jul-2021:
It’s more than 30 years since I read The Handmaid’s Tale. I think it’s well past time that I reread it 📖
28-Jul-2021:
Here’s Dea Poirier on Crime Reads about writing fiction without the ability to visualize. I don’t think I’d ever go as far as filling out an Excel spreadsheet …
27-Jul-2021:
I hadn’t seen this before, and stumbled on it while looking for something else: Eileen Battersby’s ranking of Ian McEwan’s novels. Among the ones to avoid, she …
26-Jul-2021:
The internet is flowing like sludge. I wonder if there can be some kind of sporting event taking place that’s using up everybody’s bandwidth?
26-Jul-2021:
Since I started to use Medium with my own domain, I find that I’m very happy with it as a place to post my own writing. As a place to find things I want to …
26-Jul-2021:
It’s occurred to me that maybe I should sell my iPad Air 3 and my iPhone 12 Mini and replace them both with a regular iPhone 12, but I’ll resist the temptation. …
26-Jul-2021:
I’m finding that I tend to skip over tweets (and Micro.blog posts) that have multiple emojis, much as I used to do with tweets containing more than one hashtag. …
26-Jul-2021:
I hope I’m not being unfair to Alexis Nowicki when I say that I don’t believe that Kristen Roupenian did anything wrong.
From the most recent issue of my …
26-Jul-2021:
What iOS and iPad need, IMO, is an easy, unambiguous way to collapse a selection. I’m fed up tapping at the end of a piece of selected text only to follow a …
25-Jul-2021:
Here’s a highly informative post by Richard Williams about Mose Allison, about whom I knew less than I should have. I’m not sure I want a 6-CD box, but I’d love …
25-Jul-2021:
My posts on Medium have been getting much less external (i.e. mainly Google) traffic recently. Maybe this was already happening before I was using my own domain …
25-Jul-2021:
There’s lots to think about in this post from Noah Smith: Why is China smashing its tech industry?
24-Jul-2021:
I noticed recently that when I reposted old posts/articles on Medium, it put them at the top of the timeline instead of slotting them in at the date of first …
23-Jul-2021:
I bought a CD player a few months ago after years without one, and I’ve been using it mainly to play CDs. I just found out that when I’m playing through the …
23-Jul-2021:
I’m fully exempt from having to watch Shyamalan’s Old, because I’ve read the spoilers. Quite entertaining, actually.
23-Jul-2021:
Though I went to school in Sligo and was born and brought up in the county, I’ve been to the Sligo Jazz Festival only once, in 2012. I’d have gone this year but …
23-Jul-2021:
The new lists feature in Medium has something useful that I hadn’t noticed till now: a “Recently viewed” tab that contains a history of the pages you’ve …
21-Jul-2021:
Here’s the post explaining what Medium lists are about and how to make them. It’s all very straightforward: I made two of them ([Book …
21-Jul-2021:
The past two weeks haven’t gone particularly slowly, yet it seems like ages since I’ve sent out an issue of the newsletter. Well, here’s one at last: Uncovering …
21-Jul-2021:
This came in the post today. I think I’ll enjoy reading it.
20-Jul-2021:
The next wave of Facebook Bulletin writers in case you’re interested/curious. There’s nothing here that grabs my attention and I don’t want to have anything to …
20-Jul-2021:
My second attempt at a Medium list naturally had to be about aphantasia and SDAM (severely deficient autobiographical memory)
20-Jul-2021:
Medium has a new feature: user-generated lists. This is my first attempt — Literary discussion and criticism
19-Jul-2021:
I love Law & Order. Particularly seasons 5 through 17, when Jack McCoy was EADA. The first 4 seasons, though they had Steven Hill, might as well be a …
19-Jul-2021:
I was taken aback by the tone of comments on this post about Angular. Not just disagreement but scorn, contumely and vituperation. Someone suggested it was …
19-Jul-2021:
Alan Jacobs (@ayjay) was not happy with the ReMarkable (because of low contrast) or the Kobo Elipsa (poor build quality and unresponsive software), making me …
18-Jul-2021:
I hadn’t thought about BookFunnel for years till, a few days ago, I followed a link that led to a BF landing page. Today I learn (again via Nate Hoffelder) that …
18-Jul-2021:
If you use an email address based on your own domain, don’t ever let that domain registration expire without first changing the email on your Paypal, bank …
18-Jul-2021:
I woke up in the night, thought I had something in my eye and tried to pull on my eyelash to dislodge it. But I couldn’t find the eyelash. So, when I got up …
18-Jul-2021:
Ought-to-correct is such a bloody menace. Why do I ever have it turned on?
18-Jul-2021:
All of my devices (Mac, iPad, iPhone) are plugged in, charging. None of them is near where I want to sit. I guess I’ll just have to read a book.
17-Jul-2021:
I plugged my iPod Touch into the Mac to replace 2 albums that had managed to delete themselves from the former. When I ejected it, the screen brightness had …
17-Jul-2021:
A few days ago I posted a rather gloomy piece about the crisis in the arts. To balance that out a bit, I wanted to remind myself of this more sanguine post from …
15-Jul-2021:
Note to self: next time I order from coffeeclick.ie I’m to get the Lavazza Gran Espresso rather than the Super Crema. (The latter was on special offer last …
14-Jul-2021:
I just posted this on Medium (aka my blog): “Don’t blame the pandemic: the arts were already in crisis”. To the best of my knowledge, it’s not behind the …
13-Jul-2021:
I love this dismissal by @baldur of Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 true fans” notion. I wonder if there’s any empirical evidence either way, though. Has anyone ever …
10-Jul-2021:
I just posted this on Medium: Habits and habitation.
10-Jul-2021:
My Twitter timeline is almost all in black & white this morning. What’s up?
09-Jul-2021:
If you enjoy the Bluestocking, … do howl into the Twitter void about it. I live only in the golden moment of your applause.
My favourite Substack newsletter …
08-Jul-2021:
I got a flat tyre 🚲 5 Km from home, on my way back from shopping in Westport. Normally, I’d have a spare inner tube in my pannier but bike shops have been …
06-Jul-2021:
Keychain refuses either to save my password for JSTOR or to suggest a new strong password when I reset it (which I’ve had to do regularly because it won’t save …
06-Jul-2021:
Having tried this approach for several days now, I confirm that leaving the coffee in the Aeropress for just 36 seconds works best for me. I use an espresso …
06-Jul-2021:
Is it possible to crosspost to Twitter using the feed for a particular MB category (e.g. “tweet”)? I’ve tried a couple of times to set this up but I can’t …
06-Jul-2021:
I’m seeing a lot of mildly annoying posts from a particular writer on Medium, so I decide to unfollow her — only to find that I’m not following her. I’m seeing …
06-Jul-2021:
Medium has always tended to behave differently in Safari for iPad than it does in macOS Safari. I just discovered that if you’re editing a post on the iPad, you …
05-Jul-2021:
I just got a text from officialdom asking if I was still living at the same address as when I came back to Ireland in Oct 2020. I’m not, so they asked me to …
05-Jul-2021:
I’m encouraged to find that Andy Matuschak takes the same view as I do on the relative merits of PDF and epub.
04-Jul-2021:
Oddly enough, I wasn’t conscious of this when I was setting up the talkaboutbooks.net domain for my Substack newsletter but it’s just struck me that my reason …
04-Jul-2021:
I’ve been trying the Logitech K380 Bluetooth keyboard (that I usually use with the iPad) with the iPhone. Surprisingly, Cmd-Tab to switch apps doesn’t seem to …
04-Jul-2021:
Scott Flanigan picks 10 tracks by Brad Mehldau I can’t do without. I’d have made some different choices — “50 ways to leave your lover” from Day Is Done, and “I …
03-Jul-2021:
Steven Soderbergh has made another heist movie, his sixth after Out of Sight (1998), the Oceans trilogy (2001, 2004, 2007), and Logan Lucky (2017).
So The …
03-Jul-2021:
I may not have lost my taste for coffee after all. I’d taken too seriously a YouTube video that recommended letting the coffee sit in the Aeropress for 2 …
03-Jul-2021:
Like Vincent van Gogh and Marvell’s “Little T C”, Roddy Doyle was given the same first name as an older sibling who had died 📖
03-Jul-2021:
I just posted “A custom domain for my Substack newsletter”. It’s on Medium but not paywalled.
02-Jul-2021:
I’ve been meaning to read Felicia C Sullivan’s novel, Follow Me into the Dark📖, since I found some of her short stories on Medium about 4 years ago. I’ve now …
02-Jul-2021:
Jonathan Carroll is one of the most reliably good writers on Medium. Here’s a snippet from him that I hope you fountain pen enthusiasts will enjoy ✒️
02-Jul-2021:
I’ve been having a bit of discussion about RSS with MarkStarlin over on Medium about RSS feeds (particularly their usefulness for following people/topics on …
02-Jul-2021:
I just deleted two short posts referring to this piece on the Catholic nuptials of Boris Johnson. Let the piece speak for itself, I no longer wish to express an …
01-Jul-2021:
I decided to go ahead and use a custom domain with my Substack newsletter. Still not sure it’s worth it but I like the domain and thought it would be nice to …
30-Jun-2021:
Dustin Grinnell, How to write with aphantasia on Aphantasia Network. Good a reason as any to reup my Reading Wuthering Heights with aphantasia.
30-Jun-2021:
I’m awfully tempted to register a domain name to use with my Substack newsletter. Substack charges $50 to use a custom domain and I’m not persuaded there’s any …
29-Jun-2021:
I just Googled “lost my taste for coffee” and got 14,500 hits. So, I guess it’s a thing. This is worrying 😮 Drinking 3 to 4 double espressos a day is the main …
29-Jun-2021:
I was hunting through the iTunes Music folder (in the file system), to add back music that had once been in my iTunes/Apple Music library but had somehow been …
29-Jun-2021:
Why Amazon’s recommendation system is a disaster. Amazon’s reviews are rubbish. From the Department of Sylvan Ursine Digestion Studies.
29-Jun-2021:
I’ve noticed that my lack of a visual self-image is a recurring theme in my writing about aphantasia. I can’t picture myself-in-the-world. But Googling “self …
29-Jun-2021:
Either the bezels on my iPad Air 3 are too narrow or my thumbs are too big ☹️
28-Jun-2021:
I’ve been trying to log in to NY Review of Books to read one article for free, but it tells me that my password is wrong. So I reset the password and save the …
27-Jun-2021:
I’ve just been listening to Florian Ross Trio’s album Blinds and Shades for the first time in a while. I’d forgotten how good it is 🎶 🎹 😎
27-Jun-2021:
I sat down this morning to write a blog post about “Tech’s unfulfilled promises” over the past four decades, and discovered that I had already written that very …
26-Jun-2021:
I took a trip on a train,
And I thought about … doing this more often.
25-Jun-2021:
Here’s a mini-review by Ted Gioia of Bill Evans’s On a Friday Evening, a little known, previously unreleased recording from 1975
25-Jun-2021:
I’m Back on Twitter: maybe for good this time.
23-Jun-2021:
The latest issue of my newsletter is Judicial misconduct: Scott Turow’s judges, prosecutors and defence lawyers. I hope you enjoy it. There’ll be more in 2 …
21-Jun-2021:
I just learned that Craig Venter has aphantasia. Other interesting people who have/had it include the philosopher Derek Parfit.
21-Jun-2021:
The most exciting musical performance I ever attended was by the Brad Mehldau Trio in Sète, July 2008. I’m so tempted to go back for more, but not sure it’s …
20-Jun-2021:
I just got a renewal receipt from Zoho Mail, so I guess that means it’s already a year since I started using my own domain for email. Time flies.
19-Jun-2021:
… in the likely event of McDonald becoming taoiseach?
Likely event? More and more, I’m asking myself if I can still live in Ireland if Sinn Féin becomes the …
19-Jun-2021:
This happens every other weekend and I’m getting really fed up with it. The Cancel button is greyed out and there’s no way to dismiss the box. I’ll have to …
18-Jun-2021:
Yesterday, I tweeted a link to an NYT article, “The boys in their summer dresses”. Coincidentally, 3 days earlier, I’d posted a blog post illustrated by a still …
17-Jun-2021:
It turns out that Medium were indeed clearing out bots and spam accounts: Keeping Medium authentic.
17-Jun-2021:
Not that it makes a lot of practical difference, but I seem to have lost 150 followers on Medium all at once. The count has dropped from about 713 to 563 since …
17-Jun-2021:
I’m really enjoying Noah Smith’s Substack newsletter, Noahpinion, at least for now. I’ll get fed up eventually, as I always do when the topic is the dismal …
17-Jun-2021:
NYT: The boys in their summer dresses. I’m afraid I’d look like ram dressed as lamb. Why didn’t this happen 35 years ago?
17-Jun-2021:
In July 2019 I posted a short piece on Medium, What Colm Tóibín said about genre fiction. Then, a few months ago, I moved it from Medium to my own site, as a …
17-Jun-2021:
I hate “recommendations”. I had hoped mine would improve after I resumed my Medium subscription, as reading more paywalled stories would give a better idea of …
16-Jun-2021:
A little over 3 years ago, I learned that most people can form mental images and that those of us who can’t have a condition called aphantasia. Over the next 2 …
16-Jun-2021:
As it’s Bloomsday (the anniversary of the day on which James Joyce’s great novel is set, 16 June 1904), here again is the issue of my newsletter in which I …
15-Jun-2021:
Edward Snowden has started a Substack newsletter
15-Jun-2021:
”Heroes don’t do that.”
So glad I’ve never aspired to be a hero (super or otherwise) if that’s true 📺
15-Jun-2021:
Sometimes the saying that “Twitter isn’t real life” is true! But sometimes Twitter actually is real life, like when outrage on the platform gets people fired …
15-Jun-2021:
I’m listening at the moment to “Bud Powell” (song) by Chick Corea (pianist) … or have I got that the wrong way around? 🎶 🎹
15-Jun-2021:
Ireland’s data watchdog loses sole oversight of Facebook in Europe Though the ECJ judgment is being characterized as a “loss” for Ireland’s Data Protection …
15-Jun-2021:
It’s counterproductive to call for Justice Breyer to step down before the midterm elections. For him to accede to such demands would be to accept that the …
14-Jun-2021:
The Guardian: Rightwing firm posed as leftist group on Facebook to divide Democrats. Now there’s a surprise! It looks like a breach of campaign finance laws but …
13-Jun-2021:
Here’s a 2,000 word piece about aphantasia in the NYT by Carl Zimmer (who alerted Adam Zeman to the existence of people who had been aphantasic from birth). …
13-Jun-2021:
I’ve just been followed on Medium by Smokestack Lightnin’. Oh, sorry, no. It’s Substack Writing. That’s good too.
13-Jun-2021:
He changed the lives of many, myself included, with his disdain for hierarchy, humour and generosity …
Philippe Sands on “the outstanding public international …
13-Jun-2021:
I should probably make it clear that I didn’t mean “What a clown!” in a good way 😉
13-Jun-2021:
I missed this at the time but it has resurfaced in the context of President Biden’s quotation from Yeats’s “Easter 1916”. Boris Johnson, then Foreign Secretary, …
12-Jun-2021:
I stayed with Ryan Holiday’s Conspiracy📚 to the end, in case there were any surprises. Not sure it was worth it. It’s an intriguing story, but shoehorned into …
11-Jun-2021:
I was chatting with my sister two weeks ago about Donen’s Charade🍿 and mentioned that I’ve always meant to rewatch Jonathan Demme’s remake, The Truth about …
11-Jun-2021:
Here’s a nice coincidence. It seems that President Biden quoted Yeats’s “Easter 1916” during his UK visit. Coincidence because the phrase “where motley is worn” …
11-Jun-2021:
Found it (in another room I can’t remember going into, obviously).
11-Jun-2021:
I had the handle of the coffee grinder in my hand a few minutes ago. I put it down while I was filling the grinder with beans and now I can’t find the handle …
10-Jun-2021:
Really, most science fiction is about economics
says Noah Smith, in Science fiction novels for economists. I used to be obsessed with economics but I’ve lost …
09-Jun-2021:
The new issue of my newsletter (Talk about books) is Globalization noir: Alan Glynn’s Winterland, Bloodland and Graveland trilogy. I enjoyed rereading these …
09-Jun-2021:
Is it just me or is the internet excruciatingly sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooow today? I suspect that my phone service provider may be throttling my data …
08-Jun-2021:
having published as only his second book the most important English-language novel of the second half of the 20th century … he still had most of a literary …
05-Jun-2021:
I know what they mean when they say it’s unfair to demonise the whole of the clergy for just a few thousand rotten apples …
50 years of Martyn Turner cartoons …
05-Jun-2021:
Nothing playful or strange or the ahead of time stuff that’s in there.
Jeanette Winterson burns her own books because the publisher’s covers and blurbs …
04-Jun-2021:
Well, I held off for almost 6 years but I’ve finally turned off slide over and split view on the iPad. I don’t think I’ve ever invoked them intentionally. I …
04-Jun-2021:
I’ve avoided Medium’s RSS feeds in the past because they included comments/responses as well as substantial posts. It seems they no longer do this, so I’ve …
03-Jun-2021:
I noticed that some albums I’d bought as iTunes downloads had gone from my Apple Music library, so I went to look for them in the iTunes store but they weren’t …
03-Jun-2021:
So, I plugged the iPod Touch into the MacBook Air to copy some music across and it prompted me to download iOS 14.5. It started at “9 hours remaining”, went up …
03-Jun-2021:
Never mind pilates, yoga and whatnot, we should be able to go to falling-over sessions during which we’re pulled, pushed and tripped over willy-nilly until we …
02-Jun-2021:
I suppose what I mean is, on the one hand, since the HTML specification makes it clear that italics aren’t only for emphasis, it annoys me that Medium and …
02-Jun-2021:
I stopped italicizing book and journal titles in posts on Medium and Substack because both of those platforms treat all inline italics as emphasis. In …
01-Jun-2021:
I borrowed Ryan Holiday’s Conspiracy📚 from the library on impulse just because the ebook was available without a wait. Great story but I’m not sure I’m in the …
31-May-2021:
I didn’t enjoy Liz Nugent’s Our Little Cruelties📖 as much as her earlier books. She alternates the internal voices of the 3 Drumm brothers but they’re not …
31-May-2021:
Terence Eden asks What are unusual characters?
31-May-2021:
Who knew? “Pro” at the end of a name can sometimes mean “Programmer’s”: as in “Polish Pro” keyboard layout. Great story about how it became impossible to type …
30-May-2021:
I’m about halfway through Liz Nugent’s Our Little Cruelties (ebook borrowed from the library). It’s Nugent, so the characters are unsympathetic, ghastly. I’m …
30-May-2021:
My first substantial post since I went back to using Medium as my blog. A kind of addendum to last week’s issue of the newsletter: “Still to be plagued in …
30-May-2021:
Not that I’d trust Boris Johnson’s judgment or advice on anything, but maybe it’s time to repeal section 18, Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829. Just a thought. …
29-May-2021:
Now that I’m using Medium as my blog, I thought of importing some blog-style posts from my static site, so I worked out how to handle canonical links. However, …
29-May-2021:
I looked out the window at 5.30 this morning and saw that the sky was a vivid red. It looked beautiful but I thought “uh-oh, shepherd’s warning”. Four hours …
28-May-2021:
Matt Yglesias says that Twitter may be creating “bubbles of fake consensus” across various fields of expertise: science, economics and maybe others. Long, …
27-May-2021:
For weeks (months?) now, whenever I follow a link to a New York Times story it tells me I’ve reached my limit of free articles. Permanently? Or just for this …
27-May-2021:
The fact that this is called The Beast Must Die and features a “Detective Strangeways” suggests to me that diabolical liberties have been taken with the plot of …
27-May-2021:
I’ve never read anything by Patrick O’Brian, (though I heard a bit of one of his novels being read on Radio 4 many years ago — when I used to listen to Radio …
27-May-2021:
Here is the latest issue of my newsletter, Talk about books. The title is “To overreach the devil”: William Empson partly rewrites Marlowe’s Faustus. It’s the …
27-May-2021:
I sought a theme and … think I’ve found one. It’s big and unruly and hard to wrestle with, though.
27-May-2021:
The most recent issue of Ted Gioia’s newsletter, How I became the honest broker, covers a lot of ground and is well worth reading in full. But this passage …
26-May-2021:
So Amazon has bought MGM. (Hat tip @dave 😀.) I’ve got a copy of 12 Angry Men on DVD that I probably haven’t watched for more than 15 years. I suppose I’m …
26-May-2021:
I’ll probably continue to wear a mask in public when I’m fully vaccinated. Two reasons:
I broke one of my front teeth last year and I haven’t been able to get …
26-May-2021:
I remember someone complaining about the way iPad and iOS handle text selection now. This person missed the loupe. I’m convinced that the present approach is …
26-May-2021:
there is limited awareness of the culture war debate more generally in the UK – despite a huge surge in related media coverage in recent years, from just 21 …
24-May-2021:
I think the local shop gets McNamee’s wheaten bread in on a Sunday. Yesterday, they had just one loaf left, so I assumed that it was the last of the previous …
24-May-2021:
I was reminded of this post, The upside of SDAM, yesterday, when I found the abandoned draft of an intended companion piece that I’d forgotten about. I’m …
24-May-2021:
Benedict Evans, quoted by Charles Arthur, on the subject of Apple’s ad strategy.
24-May-2021:
He was homeless, so would sleep on people’s floors, devouring their books.
Judy Collins, in My favourite Dylan song. It would have worked out cheaper to give …
22-May-2021:
Enticing review by Sebastian Scotney of Moravian Romance, a duo album from Miroslav Vitous and Emil Viklicky. Vitous is definitely not one of my favourite …
21-May-2021:
Here is a short (6 item) list of Substack newsletters that I like and read. I tried it out as a blogroll but I’m not (yet) happy with the way blogrolls are …
21-May-2021:
Speaking about Paul Graham, I keep forgetting to visit his site, though I mean to. The RSS feed from it doesn’t work very well, at least in NetNewsWire. There …
21-May-2021:
John Naughton linked to a 2009 essay by Paul Graham which is a revelation to me. Since learning about #aphantasia, I’ve blamed my scheduling failures on my …
20-May-2021:
I’ve noticed a lot of Substack users asking how to find new writers or newsletters on the platform. I use Google, with site:substack.com added to my search …
20-May-2021:
After trying it for a few days, I’ve removed the “blogroll” (officially called “Homepage links”) from my Substack archive page. It was making the page look …
20-May-2021:
I’ve been driving myself crazy trying to figure out why I can’t get some music to sync from Apple Music to my iPod Touch. It turns out that, though this music …
19-May-2021:
I’m rereading (after a very long gap) William Empson’s 📖 Faustus and the Censor (1987) for the next issue of my newsletter. It will be the third (and probably …
19-May-2021:
Vous n’encaissez pas la vérité!
But can you handle the deepfake? via Charles Arthur, The Overspill 😉
18-May-2021:
Microsoft Teams for personal use is now available on the web/desktop as well as on iOS and Android, it says here. I’ve been using it on iPad since Aug/Sep, as a …
17-May-2021:
“There are many ways in which the thing I am trying in vain to say may be tried in vain to be said”
Lara Marlowe on the affinity between Beckett and …
17-May-2021:
Legislation will be introduced, the Queen said last week, to “restore the balance of power between the executive, legislature and the courts”.
Joshua …
16-May-2021:
Whoever designed the sardine tin, with its thin, springy metal top that practically guarantees you’ll either slice your hand or spray ketchup/oil on yourself, …
16-May-2021:
I’ve been trying out the new “blogroll” feature on Substack. I think it makes the page look too cramped, so I’ll probably remove it and put my list of …
16-May-2021:
It seems that I only ever mention Lawrence Lessig when I write “I don’t usually agree with Lessig, but …”. Here he is On the issues with free speech
16-May-2021:
Well, I read An Anonymous Girl to the end. It got better in the second half and the plot was quite well handled, though utterly daft. I didn’t believe a word of …
16-May-2021:
What’s this about Martial Solal hanging up his piano stool? I went to a trio concert of his in Aix-en-Provence in (approx) 2013 that was billed as part of his …
16-May-2021:
I wish I could get the MacBook Air and iPad to connect to the iPhone’s personal hotspot automatically. Every time I wake one of them from sleep, I have to go …
15-May-2021:
I’m a third of the way through An Anonymous Girl📚 by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen and I’m thinking about giving up. Its premise is extremely contrived; …
14-May-2021:
I swear, if Twitter keeps nagging me to turn on notifications I will delete my account again 😡
14-May-2021:
Here’s more about Substack’s acquisition of People & Company, from one of the latter’s founders.
13-May-2021:
Substack announces that it has acquired People & Company, an organization specializing in “community building”. I don’t know exactly what this means, but …
12-May-2021:
I’ve just sent out the latest (by my count the 13th) issue of my Talk about books newsletter. The title is “Morally neutral at best: Sally Rooney’s …
12-May-2021:
Tried again. Something is downloading this time: 5.69GB of software. Fingers crossed.
11-May-2021:
So, I plugged the iPhone into my MacBook Air and followed the steps to Restore. It says it’s downloading the software but I’m not convinced that anything is …
11-May-2021:
Whenever you change the passcode on your iPhone, or set one up for the first time, the phone should force you to use it the first 5 or 6 times, before it allows …
11-May-2021:
I haven’t read anything by Christopher Priest except The Prestige📚, — my review — and I read that only after (and because of) seeing Nolan’s film. I’d like to …
10-May-2021:
I tweaked the font colour on what I’ve now started to call “my static site” slightly. I know that some people were finding the yellow text too garish, so I’ve …
10-May-2021:
I posted yesterday about using my Medium profile with my own domain. I’m not sure, but at first glance it looks as if Medium’s RSS feeds might no longer include …
09-May-2021:
I had been slowly moving my old posts from Medium to artkavanagh.ie. But Medium has changed in the meantime. It now allows customization of themes and fonts, …
07-May-2021:
Listening for (maybe) the first time since the first decade of this millennium to 🎹 Bill Evans’s album You Must Believe In Spring 🎶. Eddie Gomez’s bass sounds …
07-May-2021:
Enrico Pieranunzi has made so many great albums that I sometimes go for months without listening to some of my favourites e.g. Dream Dance (2010). Forgot how …
07-May-2021:
One of the reasons I got a Nokia flip phone rather than a smartphone last year was that I had been missing T9. I hate using a QWERTY keyboard on a small screen. …
06-May-2021:
After 2 days with my first ever iPhone, I think it’s helping me to appreciate the iPad better: I’d stopped noticing how much I like the latter’s big screen and …
06-May-2021:
I think Substack is down.
06-May-2021:
Why is it bad that investment companies are buying whole estates? Rents in and around Dublin are preposterously high, which is what has attracted the investment …
04-May-2021:
I’ve owned a succession of iPads and iPod Touches but never, till today, an iPhone (it’s a 12 Mini). At first I thought I couldn’t open the sim tray: the …
04-May-2021:
I followed Terence Eden’s advice to hide Trending topics on Twitter. I chose Finnish because not only do I not speak it but it bears no apparent relation to …
03-May-2021:
I just accidentally deleted Kottke.org from NetNewsWire (moving my finger without noticing that it was touching the screen, happens to me a lot). So, I was …
02-May-2021:
Writing about Midnight’s Children for my newsletter emphasized something that should have been obvious, but that I’d missed: I can still love Rushdie’s second …
02-May-2021:
Adam Roberts on Twitter
02-May-2021:
I’ve just finished reading Emma Healey’s Whistle in the Dark. Not at all what the reviews led me to expect (a mystery/crime fiction) and quite slow early on, …
02-May-2021:
In case you were wondering, a reminder as to why I no longer italicize book and journal titles in my Talk about books newsletter.
30-Apr-2021:
Several days late, the newest issue of my newsletter, Talk about books, is finally out. The title is Midnight’s Children: “A thousand and one dead ends”. Next …
30-Apr-2021:
the salvation of humanity coming in the form of a cybernetically enhanced dolphin …
Why Johnny Mnemonic isn’t a bad movie. It’s been 30 years since I read …
30-Apr-2021:
This weekend the Bray jazz festival would normally take place. I miss it, and wonder who would have been playing. Next year, eh? 🎶
29-Apr-2021:
One year and 9 days after the last time, I just knocked over a full Aeropress ☕️. I’ll have to remember to be on my guard next April.
29-Apr-2021:
the collapse of Foster’s leadership … relates to her failing to vote against a ban on gay conversion therapy and resuming meetings with the Irish Government, …
28-Apr-2021:
How come Daniel Ek is a billionaire? Spotify really oughtn’t to be making anybody rich.
27-Apr-2021:
I didn’t know Tadd Dameron’s “Hot House” till I recently bought the Corea album Further Explorations🎶, but I recognized that it’s “quoted” in something else I …
27-Apr-2021:
It appears that Will Oremus has accepted Medium’s severance money and left OneZero, though not (so far) for Substack.
24-Apr-2021:
I’m writing about Midnight’s Children for the next issue of my newslettern and found this excellent piece by Rushdie, in which he looks at the significance of …
22-Apr-2021:
Terence Eden has an ingenious way to “hide” Trending topics on Twitter. But I think we need to get rid of them for everybody, not just ourselves. Still, I love …
22-Apr-2021:
Before StackOverflow existed, I used to Google how to do something and the top hit would be a forum reply to someone who’d asked the same question, telling …
22-Apr-2021:
I need to read 300 pages today if I’m going to finish rereading Midnight’s Children in time to write my newsletter at the weekend. I wish I could go and sit in …
22-Apr-2021:
It finally struck me that the line from a song, “We got stars direct in our face” is really meant to be “We got stars directin’ our fates”. Easy mistake to make …
20-Apr-2021:
I really hate liveblogs. Surely there’s a better way to cover events and announcements.
17-Apr-2021:
A woman would have told her where to stick him. But Jones had no female friends.
Review of John Sutherland’s biography of Monica Jones, whose student he was at …
16-Apr-2021:
I started to read Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (2005) last night, and immediately realized that I’ve started to read it before, probably about 12 years …
16-Apr-2021:
Ha! I got 8 out of 10 in this Game of Thrones quiz and I never read any of the books or saw a single episode of the tv show. (That’s what I do: I ignore hit tv …
13-Apr-2021:
I just came across this 4-year-old post on Scott Turow’s previous novel, Testimony. (Reading current one, The Last Trial, now.) I don’t know enough about …
12-Apr-2021:
I finally got around to ordering this, two years after publication. The price put me off for a while, but in the end curiosity won out. The first editor was my …
12-Apr-2021:
While I was writing yesterday’s issue of the newsletter, about Ian McEwan’s Saturday, it was brought home to me how distorting the book reviews had been, and …
12-Apr-2021:
Apparently, the Charlie Jazz festival at Vitrolles is expected to go ahead this year. I saw the Brad Mehldau trio there 6 years ago. Tinny piano, superb …
11-Apr-2021:
Here’s Richard Williams’s favourable review of the new trio album from Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh and Tyshawn Sorey, Uneasy. That’s the album that @mjkaul …
11-Apr-2021:
The latest issue of my Substack newsletter, Talk about books, has just gone out. It’s titled On ‘Dover Beach’: Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Next issue, in 2 weeks, …
10-Apr-2021:
Instead of reacting to the disaster of the 2008 property crash by resetting national policy to make housing affordable and available, the system did everything …
09-Apr-2021:
Whatever happened to “don’t break the Back button?” I’ve noticed several times on The Irish Times recently that hitting Back brings you back to … the page …
08-Apr-2021:
I missed the fact that Tavernier died a few weeks ago. Here’s a superb reminder of what a great film ’Round Midnight was. I didn’t get to see it till several …
08-Apr-2021:
A few weeks ago, I bought a CD player, the first I’ve owned for about 12 years. And yesterday I ordered on CD an album that I’d already bought as an iTunes …
07-Apr-2021:
Medium gives you no control over what appears in your blogroll, but setting it up is as easy as checking a box. Substack’s homepage links are more versatile, …
05-Apr-2021:
Hemingway feels increasingly irrelevant today, his influence diminished to a vanishing point, his reputation corroded by a dated personal mythos.
So says Laura …
05-Apr-2021:
I’ve just moved a dozen or so miscellaneous blog-type posts from Medium to artkavanagh.ie. I’d already moved nearly all my fiction and all book …
04-Apr-2021:
Last night I finished watching the 2018 tv adaptation of Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl, one ep a night for 6 nights. I’m wondering if it’s much different …
03-Apr-2021:
I don’t write this in defence of the manifest and ugly inequalities in my country today. But I’m not sure exaggeration to the point of actual mendacity is the …
02-Apr-2021:
I’ve moved some more posts from Medium to artkavanagh.ie, so that I can eventually delete my Medium profile. Today’s moves:
Gillian Flynn, Dark Places
Kate …
02-Apr-2021:
I will say to this day, the way I made it is an interesting movie that I like. It is not Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. The problem is that everyone that …
01-Apr-2021:
I have to admit that I usually don’t make it all the way through Matt Stoller’s antimonopoly newsletter, BIG. Today’s issue, though, was on a subject that’s …
01-Apr-2021:
That last post was partly an experiment in posting straight HTML to Micro.blog — HTML is valid Markdown by definition, but I don’t think that all HTML tags are …
01-Apr-2021:
PDF is still preferable to ePub
But maybe the optimal page size is larger than I thought This piece was originally posted on Medium in February 2021. I thought I was going to move my posts off …
01-Apr-2021:
It’s 40 years since The Long Good Friday came out. It towers over most of the London gangster films that came later.
31-Mar-2021:
As it’s the 400th anniversary of Andrew Marvell’s birth, here are links to some things I’ve written about him:
Andrew Marvell’s Gender (paywall)
The paradoxical …
29-Mar-2021:
I’m ripping a DVD for the first time in ages, which means that I’m hearing the fan in my MacBook Air for the first time in living memory. If I were going to …
28-Mar-2021:
I’ve sent out the 10th issue of my newsletter, Talk about books. This one’s called Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith and Wilkie Collins’s Armadale: The complications …
28-Mar-2021:
I’ve been on a bit of a “Round Midnight” binge this morning, listening to versions by Jürgen Friedrich, Keith Jarrett/Charlie Haden, and Bud Powell for starters …
28-Mar-2021:
the voice of leftish Ulster Protestantism, inclined towards trade unionism, the Workers’ Party, and a bit of a gamble, but not above staying in Bloom’s Hotel …
27-Mar-2021:
The winds of March that make my heart a dancer
These Foolish Things
27-Mar-2021:
I usually hate nostalgia about literary Dublin; or indeed any aspect of Dublin — it brings to mind a maudlin song by Pete St John that I refuse to name — but I …
27-Mar-2021:
I just Googled the difference between “jointure” and “portion” and got many hits relating to SQL Server. Everything old is new again, it seems.
27-Mar-2021:
Microsoft Exchange/Outlook has just nagged me three times to enter my work email password and 2fa code — on a Saturday! Maybe my own fault for having my work …
26-Mar-2021:
Substack has added/improved some features, including links on the home page, which can be used to create a blogroll. I noticed a blogroll on somebody’s Substack …
26-Mar-2021:
I wish Alboran Trio were still making albums. I’m now listening to this one🎶 🎹
26-Mar-2021:
Casey Newton reports on The mess at Medium.
Though I’ve moved almost all my fiction to artkavanagh.ie, I’ve left many of my aphantasia posts on Medium, to …
25-Mar-2021:
Yesterday, I was trying in vain to remember Tim Harford’s surname so that I could search for a podcast episode to which I’d lost the link. Today, I came across …
24-Mar-2021:
On Memex 1.1 yesterday, John Naughton mentioned Tim Hwang’s Subprime Attention Crisis, which was new to me. Reading about it reminded me of this piece I posted …
24-Mar-2021:
More changes at Medium. What I think this means is that Medium is going to focus less on its publications like OneZero and more on individual writers, but it’s …
23-Mar-2021:
Having published her first novel when she was 61, Penelope Fitzgerald
… spent the last twenty five years of her life writing some of the best novels written in …
22-Mar-2021:
I’ve never ground coffee till now: I drink it too quickly for it to go stale. But I can’t get the preground kind I like here, so I’ve been ordering 4 Kg of …
21-Mar-2021:
Maybe when you buy a book of short stories, you have to expect that there will be one or two standouts and that many or most will fall flat. Terence Eden is a …
21-Mar-2021:
Oh, Chatterbox Guy is going so fast that he’s going back in time! I get it
I don’t think Laura Miller was all that impressed either.
21-Mar-2021:
Adam Roberts didn’t enjoy the Snyder cut but at least he got to let off steam writing about it 🍿
19-Mar-2021:
I was very disappointed when I saw Cutter’s Way (1981)🍿. Eventually, I realized that the fault must be with me, not the film, but I never got the opportunity to …
19-Mar-2021:
There will be no war, but in the struggle for peace not a stone will be left standing.
Good discussion by Bruce Riordan of all 9 George Smiley novels. I …
18-Mar-2021:
When you visit a site from that site’s RSS feed, it really ought to know better than to nag you to sign up for its email newsletter. It’s a reasonable inference …
16-Mar-2021:
Christopher Nolan’s Memento🍿 is 20 years old. I still think it’s great, which is more than I can say for any of his later films that I’ve seen. (I stopped …
14-Mar-2021:
I’ve sent out the latest issue of Talk about books (newsletter). The title is An epical forged cheque: William Empson reads Ulysses and it’s the second in a …
14-Mar-2021:
Legendary guitarist and songwriter Richard Thompson has written a memoir, Beeswing: Fairport, Folk-Rock and Finding My Voice📖
11-Mar-2021:
According to Twitter the hashtag “NoTallMen” is trending in Ireland. Wonder what that’s about 🤷
11-Mar-2021:
I just cancelled my digital subscription to the NYT. It’s a surprisingly protracted process. Luckily, I wasn’t in a hurry to go anywhere.
11-Mar-2021:
Steve Goble says It’s time to appreciate Wilkie Collins’s lesser known classics. I couldn’t agree more. The only one he mentions that I haven’t yet read is …
11-Mar-2021:
But they hate us so much that they don’t care what they’re losing …
Great piece by Naoise Dolan about autism, lockdown, socializing and more. I’ve noticed that …
10-Mar-2021:
I just deliberately chose to buy an album on CD rather than from iTunes, even though it cost about €8 more (€23.87 as against €16) and will take up to 2 weeks …
10-Mar-2021:
Piers Morgan is “off to spend more time with my opinions”. I almost feel sorry for him when he puts it like that, then I remember that he can probably tolerate …
09-Mar-2021:
I hadn’t known that Anne Sacoolas does not deny causing Harry Dunn’s death. Her lawyer says US won’t waive diplomatic immunity because it wouldn’t be criminal …
08-Mar-2021:
Deathbed regrets: I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time trying to figure out what my purpose in life was, and what I ought to be doing. (OK, I’m not yet at …
07-Mar-2021:
I haven’t yet read Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun📖, but I did find in Constance Grady’s Vox review a statement about an earlier novel that I wanted to take …
07-Mar-2021:
Sorry about this but I’m reposting a link that I already posted here yesterday: Paul Graham and the online essay (by me). By the time it appeared in the …
07-Mar-2021:
A very rare piano solo album by Tommy Flanagan, In his own sweet time. Recorded 1994; he died in 2001 🎶 🎹
06-Mar-2021:
“Once Brad Mehldau went off into one of his twelve-minute rhapsodies, and right there, about nine minutes in, you heard it: Lula-by of Birdland.”
Adam Gopnik …
06-Mar-2021:
I just posted Paul Graham and the online essay. The cofounder of Y Combinator sees his main activity as writing “essays” online. It’s a word I was surprised to …
05-Mar-2021:
It’s Bandcamp Friday (the day on which Bandcamp waives its fees, so more money goes to the musicians) and I’ve just bought 2 albums, both by the Sunna Gunnlaugs …
04-Mar-2021:
I know I’m going to order an M1 MacBook Air sooner or later, so why wait? OTOH, I’m still happy with 2019 model, which is less than 10 months old: I bought a …
04-Mar-2021:
It seems that blockchain is the future of digital rights management. Bet you didn’t see that coming 🎶
03-Mar-2021:
Pianist Dan Tepfer, Eric Harland (drums) and Jorge Roeder (bass) play a jazz trio performance 130 miles away from each other, using JackTrip open source …
02-Mar-2021:
I’m glad I didn’t read this Irish Times piece by Roisín O’Donnell before I wrote about her short stories, because it would have coloured my opinion of them. On …
28-Feb-2021:
I never read much serious science fiction. I’ve just now understood why: throughout my 20s and into my 30s, I was a marxist, and couldn’t interest myself in …
28-Feb-2021:
One reason I thought about switching my newsletter to Buttondown is that it’s just about the only newsletter provider that lets you disable the tracking pixel. …
28-Feb-2021:
I’ve just sent out the most recent issue of my Talk about books newsletter. This issue is titled Roisín O’Donnell, Wild Quiet: The “Irish” short story in the …
27-Feb-2021:
I just spent a few hours fiddling about with CSS/design on Buttondown, trying to get my newsletter to look the way I wanted. In the end, though, I decided to …
26-Feb-2021:
I’ve just exported the first three months’ worth of data from Substack (because I’m probably going to switch to Buttondown). I’m impressed and a bit surprised …
24-Feb-2021:
And then I went back to iTunes and found the album immediately, searching for “Corea Clarke White”, rather than “Forever Chick Corea Stanley Clarke” and …
24-Feb-2021:
I just bought something on eBay for the first time in … I don’t know, I’d say about 14 years. I couldn’t find this album on the iTunes Store so I thought I’d …
20-Feb-2021:
Last summer, I wrote a post in which I claimed that PDF is a preferable publishing format to ePub. I still believe that, but I think I was wrong about the …
19-Feb-2021:
I’m waiting and hoping for some major musical artist to say, “Screw this. I’m taking my music off all of the streaming services, and instead will sell it from …
18-Feb-2021:
Substack is offering “Better analytics for your subscribers”. I’m not sure I need this but I’m pleased to know that Substack is rapidly improving its service, …
18-Feb-2021:
Medium is now allowing custom domain names again. I’m thinking about making my Medium profile a subdomain of my own site (e.g.“blog”) but I’m not convinced it’s …
17-Feb-2021:
I’m not watching the tv adaptation of Behind Her Eyes, though I’m sure I’d do so if I had a tv. My original mini-review of the book from a few years ago is now …
17-Feb-2021:
Anyone who refers to film, music, or writing as “content” is simply not a trustworthy custodian of anything of cultural value.
Martin Scorsese and Ted Gioia …
16-Feb-2021:
Every web server can – and should – gzip files on transmission. Manually zipping a single file on your server doesn’t save any download time. It doesn’t save …
15-Feb-2021:
A day late but worth waiting for: the latest issue of my newsletter, Talk about books, discusses the second of Tana French’s novels, The Likeness. It’s the …
15-Feb-2021:
I liked Jonathan Carroll’s The Chocolate Conductor, kind of a character study but (unless the narrator is also a fictional character — now I’m not sure) of an …
15-Feb-2021:
Veteran jazz critic John Fordham lists Chick Corea’s 10 greatest recordings. I’ve been meaning for years now to get a copy of Further Explorations but somehow …
13-Feb-2021:
And there are very few opportunities in life to have it both ways; semicolons are the rare instance in which you can; there is absolutely no downside.
Hard to …
11-Feb-2021:
I’m remembering Chick Corea by listening to his recording of Bud Powell’s “Tempus Fugit”, with Marcus Gilmore (drums) and Carlitos del Puerto (bass)
11-Feb-2021:
Chick Corea is reported to have died at the age of 79. This has come as a big shock to me 🎹 🎶
08-Feb-2021:
It was the era of supergroups but I’m doubtful if this one would have worked. I might be quite wrong but I don’t think the Miles of that period would have fit …
08-Feb-2021:
Ted Gioia on Twitter: When you finally manage to pay the rent with your streaming royalties 🍿
07-Feb-2021:
Andrew Marvell died from an overdose of an opium-based malaria treatment, Stewart Mottram has found. I’m not so convinced that he would have eschewed quinine …
07-Feb-2021:
Is Brian Moore reemerging from obscurity? This is the second newspaper article I’ve read about him recently. The Emperor of Ice Cream📚 is one of the few early …
06-Feb-2021:
No GAA (Gaelic games) fixtures while the pandemic restrictions remain in force. Not much sport to be found. I hate that shade of green but have to admit that it …
06-Feb-2021:
Felicia C Sullivan is going to post much less on Medium — sorry, paywall — and concentrate instead on her newsletter. I hope this doesn’t mean that we’ll be …
06-Feb-2021:
It seems that Amazon is opening a fulfilment centre in Ireland because of Brexit. Otherwise there’d be delays and tax/duties on goods coming from Britain.
05-Feb-2021:
My three favourite Christopher Plummer films:
The Silent Partner (dir. Daryl Duke, 1978)
Ararat (Atom Egoyan, 2002)
Inside Man (Spike Lee, 2006)
I’d like to see …
05-Feb-2021:
This is Elmo, my sister’s dog. I was staying with my sister when the original pandemic restrictions were brought in in March. I took Elmo for a walk almost …
05-Feb-2021:
She lost in 1979 to … [Tory] Tony Marlow, a man who who opposed equal pay on the grounds that it gave power “to any feminist, any harridan, or any rattle-headed …
04-Feb-2021:
It’s not obvious from the photo, I’m afraid, but there were layers of cloud over the “mountains” this morning.
03-Feb-2021:
Though I haven’t yet worn the shoes that one of my sisters gave me for Christmas, because the weather has been so wet and miserable in the meantime, it’s a …
02-Feb-2021:
By me: Citing book and journal titles when posting on Medium and Substack. These platforms treat all inline italic text as emphasis. So how do you cite a book …
02-Feb-2021:
I don’t drink coffee first thing in the morning: I prefer water then. I aim to have my first cup around 11 am but often I don’t get around to it till after …
02-Feb-2021:
I want the Dunning-Kruger effect to be real
… says Jonathan Jarry, before concluding that it probably isn’t. But why would he want it to be real? I find it …
02-Feb-2021:
Randell Roberts, LA Times: Cicely Tyson and Miles Davis
01-Feb-2021:
Here’s a close up of some of the books I discussed in the first six issues of my newsletter 📷
01-Feb-2021:
Complaints about the number of books in circulation started as soon as printing was invented.
That’s from Lapham’s Quarterly. So, if the claim that there are …
01-Feb-2021:
“You can’t really be in a beautiful secluded part of the English countryside without thinking, ‘Oh man, someone’s going to get murdered soon …’”
Richard Osman …
31-Jan-2021:
I’ve just sent out the 6th issue of my newsletter, Talk about books. This one is about Tana French’s first novel In the Woods. (Some of you may have read an …
31-Jan-2021:
While I like Coppola’s The Conversation, I’ve slways felt that it was overpraised. This article does little to dissuade me from that opinion, though it makes me …
30-Jan-2021:
Replacing Calvinism with communism: Simon Kuper, whose biography of George Blake is just about to come out, on meeting the spy in Russia in 2012.
30-Jan-2021:
Ah, I see what it does now. It’s the shortcut for toggling the code font on and off. I didn’t notice before because I didn’t type anything after using the …
30-Jan-2021:
I just noticed that, when I’m in the Substack editor, ⌘-` doesn’t have the expected effect (switching between browser windows in Safari), but does something …
29-Jan-2021:
Well, carrying the bike up and down the stairs turns out to be no big deal. Carrying the shopping up to 4th floor (separately) is a major effort. I had been …
29-Jan-2021:
Gina Gershon’s motorbiking, Die Hard-loving detective was secretly the criminal mastermind behind the “Golden Gang” bank robbers.
… in something called …
29-Jan-2021:
I opened up a Robinhood account very early on, but for me, the mobile-only functionality was a dealbreaker. I didn’t want to be trading “on-the-go”. If I …
28-Jan-2021:
The ideal Law & Order: Criminal Intent detective pairing would have been Jeff Goldblum (Zach Nichols) and Kathryn Erbe (Alex Eames). I think that might even …
28-Jan-2021:
Here’s M G Siegler on Twitter’s acquisition of Revue, and what that means for Substack. Having read his analysis, I’m still inclined to stick with Substack for …
28-Jan-2021:
The management company of the building in which I rent an apartment say they’ve disabled the lift because of service charge unpaid (by my landlord, among …
28-Jan-2021:
If I had a suspicious mind, I’d wonder if some person or group had cleverly gone around various crucial open source projects after 2010 introducing subtle but …
27-Jan-2021:
I had been dragging my heels a bit about updating to iPadOS 14.4 until I read about the security bugs that “may have been actively exploited”. All up to date …
27-Jan-2021:
If the company publishes op-eds from the usual suspects in tech about how revolutionary their cryptocurrency-powered food replacements are, the impact it will …
27-Jan-2021:
I just saw the title of a post on Medium by Seth Godin: “Passion is a choice”. I didn’t read the post because paywall but, no, passion is by definition not a …
27-Jan-2021:
Remember that scene from the Sopranos, where Tony’s wife calls to buy 5000 shares of Webonics, after she was manipulated emotionally to so? Institutions and …
26-Jan-2021:
I just searched for a book on Kennys.ie bookshop site and got no hits, so I searched on alibris.co.uk — my usual next step when Kennys don’t have what I want. …
24-Jan-2021:
I’ve never had a problem with TextEdit before, or not that I’ve noticed, but it’s suddenly deleting the wrong paragraphs, and when I undo the delete it restores …
24-Jan-2021:
A cold, bright day. So far, at least. I shouldn’t be surprised if it gets darker later.
24-Jan-2021:
Sir Edward Carson, who prosecuted in Oscar Wilde’s trial for gross indecency, brought to his crossexamination of the playwright “all the added bitterness of an …
23-Jan-2021:
Go home? I am home. Why would you think I was anywhere else?
23-Jan-2021:
I had noticed that Lawrence Lessig has been posting behind the Medium paywall. Here’s his rationale. He also posts “friend links” (which bypass the paywall) on …
23-Jan-2021:
I’m reading Ian McEwan’s The Children Act again and, so far, enjoying it more than I did on first reading, about 3 years ago. I reread Enduring Love in Sep/Oct …
23-Jan-2021:
McConnell, focussed on Republican judicial appointments, “made a Faustian deal for all those judges.”
The New Yorker. Well, he got his judges. Faustian deals …
23-Jan-2021:
I bet Netflix will change the ending of Behind Her Eyes. I can’t see how they would make the book’s ending work on tv. You need time and words to sell it. An …
23-Jan-2021:
Small mountains, biggish sky.
22-Jan-2021:
Via Charles Arthur’s Overspill blog, I see that computer makers are finally moving away from the 16:9 aspect ratio. Why did it take so long? I’ve been …
22-Jan-2021:
After an absence of two years, I went back to Twitter at the end of November, starting from scratch with a new account. I’m going to be much more careful who I …
21-Jan-2021:
The frequently visited list in Safari on my iPad is mainly made up of sites that I almost never visit on the iPad, making it a frustratingly useless feature. …
20-Jan-2021:
It’s 25 years since Our Friends in the North first appeared on our television screens. It was great, of course. Gosh, was it dispiriting, though. Defeat after …
19-Jan-2021:
Tech offers me phones-that-are-really-cameras, tablets, smart watches, ereaders, home speakers, media streaming, voice search, and lots of other things, none of …
19-Jan-2021:
Those close to him say that Mitch McConnell has his eye on his legacy, now more than ever.
That’s unbelievable. Can he really be so blinkered as to imagine he …
19-Jan-2021:
The overflow carpark is overflowing again.
18-Jan-2021:
I see rumours that Apple will be bringing back MagSafe charging for its new MacBook Pro. While I was sorry to see MagSafe disappear a few years ago, my …
18-Jan-2021:
Of course, these figures are averaged out and based on a basket of goods etc. A lot depends on what you’re actually buying. Essentials like coffee, wine and …
18-Jan-2021:
Ireland is the 13th most expensive country in the world to live, according price comparison website Numbeo …
When rent is included, Ireland moves up to 10th …
18-Jan-2021:
If you were wondering what to make of Glose (whose acquisition by Medium was recently announced), Nate Hoffelder has the answer:
Glose is a 6 year old social …
17-Jan-2021:
I’ve sent out the fifth issue of my newsletter, “Talk about books”. The title is William Empson and Andrew Marvell’s widow, and I’ve subtitled it “Empson’s …
16-Jan-2021:
We want to rethink the book-reading experience, and we’re hiring.
Ev Williams is not being at all specific about what he hopes to achieve with Medium’s …
16-Jan-2021:
The main problem is that it has increased the attack surface against me. There’s yet another database containing my data. That means one more target for those …
16-Jan-2021:
If you’re a fan of the vinyl revival then don’t buy this album. Well do, just not on vinyl. With its pianissimos and pauses, this delicate trio music requires …
15-Jan-2021:
And speaking about ebooks, Medium has just acquired Glose, a French-based ebook “platform” (I’m not sure what that means — apparently not “publisher”).
Glose …
15-Jan-2021:
The law firm that led a class action against Apple and big five publishers almost a decade ago over ebook price fixing is now taking aim at Amazon, alleging …
15-Jan-2021:
the gap in stability and user experience has narrowed as Windows has improved and Mac OS has become less stable and more complex — at least that’s how it seems …
14-Jan-2021:
It’s hard to pick a side in the Trump-Giuliani falling-out. On the one hand, Trump has made a habit of leaving people who’ve worked for him high and dry; on the …
14-Jan-2021:
I just noticed that the computer I bought back in November is offering me “3 months FREE of Amazon Music Unlimited”. I hope I’ll be free of Amazon Music …
12-Jan-2021:
Funny to think about Brian Moore as a “neglected” author. In the late 70s and early 80s, I read everything of his I could get my hands on. But I suppose the …
11-Jan-2021:
Simon & Schuster will not, after all, be publishing Josh Hawley’s book, The Tyranny of Big Tech. I don’t mourn the loss to literature: I wouldn’t have read …
10-Jan-2021:
Katherine Whitehorn has died, aged 92. Her column was always one of the first things I’d read in The Observer, when I’d nip out to the newsagent and bring back …
10-Jan-2021:
I posted The upside of SDAM earlier. Severely deficient autobiographical memory brings advantages as well as disadvantages. For example, people who have it tend …
09-Jan-2021:
… his patient became obsessed with committing “creative suicide”, as the ultimate act in his performing career.
“I was at pains to say that he could be much …
09-Jan-2021:
The Guardian has a newly discovered short story by Patricia Highsmith, “The world’s champion ball-bouncer”. Reading it makes me glad I’ll never have to be a …
08-Jan-2021:
… the trials of making a documentary about improvisational jazz with Keith Jarrett. He cannot imagine “a more difficult subject about a more difficult person”. …
08-Jan-2021:
I’m pleased to say that Substack is now allowing customized themes. My first attempt uses the sans font for body text, fancy serif for headings and #F6D0FF as a …
08-Jan-2021:
Ted Gioia, Why music ownership matters 🎶
What happens when the mega-corporations who run the streaming services decide to delete a million songs that aren’t …
07-Jan-2021:
I’ve just been reading Stuart Neville’s short story “Echo”, in the anthology Being Various, ed. Lucy Caldwell. It’s a very moving story, told from the point of …
07-Jan-2021:
I was afraid I was going to wake up to the news that Trump had imposed martial law. When I read instead that he had pledged an “orderly transition” I was …
06-Jan-2021:
It looks as if I’m back at work: I had to boot up the Windows pc for the first time in over 2 weeks. There was a moment of panic when I tried to remember what …
05-Jan-2021:
I hope steps are being taken to prosecute Trump before an international tribunal when he leaves office for complicity in war crimes, because of his pardon of …
04-Jan-2021:
When I deleted my Google/Gmail account two weeks ago this video also disappeared from YouTube. So, I’ve uploaded it to Vimeo to make sure it’s still available. …
04-Jan-2021:
It would be oppressive to extradite Julian Assange to the US on espionage charges because of suicide risk, district judge rules
04-Jan-2021:
Snow and cloud on the Nephin “mountains” (hills, really): the view from my balcony this frosty morning.
03-Jan-2021:
I’ve just sent out the 4th issue of my Substack newsletter, Talk about books. This issue is titled Helena’s kink: Jillian Keenan on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. …
02-Jan-2021:
I’m looking at the contents list of Being Various (ed. Lucy Caldwell), trying to remember which stories I’ve already read and, of those, which I didn’t like. If …
02-Jan-2021:
For years now, I’ve been seeing knowledgeable people put Keith Jarrett’s Facing You high up on their lists of solo piano albums. I’ve owned a copy of the album …
02-Jan-2021:
I’m seeing a lot of commentary about The Great Gatsby and other works published in 1925 coming out of copyright. This is true in the US but copyright law is …
02-Jan-2021:
I seem to have completely lost interest in tech. I’m regretting the time I’ve spent over the years reading tech blogs and sites like The Verge or Ars Technica. …
02-Jan-2021:
Here’s another great tweet-length very short story by Hannah Whiteoak. I wish I knew how she does it ✏️
01-Jan-2021:
I hope the UK will do well outside the EU — but not so well that it encourages other member states to leave. It’s a delicate balance.
01-Jan-2021:
I’ve been choosing to write long posts on my 2019 MacBook Air’s butterfly keyboard instead of on the iPad with the superb Logitech K380. Though I think the …
01-Jan-2021:
2020 has just ended in this time zone. Every good wish for 2021 to you all.
31-Dec-2020:
I’ve seen some commenaries online on HBO Max’s The Flight Attendant. Since we don’t get HBO Max here, I downloaded the sample chapter of Chris Bohjalian’s …
31-Dec-2020:
Medium seems to have changed the way it tells you about new followers: it notifies you that you have a new follower but doesn’t say who that follower is, in …
31-Dec-2020:
I’m not usually a fan of extremely short (in this case, tweet-length) fiction, but Hannah Whiteoak does it very well indeed ✏️
31-Dec-2020:
Jazz pianist Frank Kimbrough has died. To be honest, not one of my favourites, but still great, and a great loss 🎶 🎹
30-Dec-2020:
I just read two short stories in a row by Kevin Barry, one in Electric Literature and the other in The New Yorker. Both set in places I used to know. I’ll add …
30-Dec-2020:
TikTok is being sued for the misuse of private informationn about a 12-year-old girl from London. A High Court judge gave permission for the claimant not to be …
30-Dec-2020:
It must be chilly today. My espresso-sized cup of coffee was cold by the time I finished it! ☕️
29-Dec-2020:
Latest addition to my short stories page: Danielle McLaughlin, “Snow Globe”: An artist under commission creates a piece of public art highlighting homelessness …
28-Dec-2020:
Here’s Ted Gioia’s list of the best online essays he read in 2020. I think I’ll be revisiting this page at regular intervals over the next few weeks.
28-Dec-2020:
As a reader of blogs, I dislike WordPress. I particularly can’t stand the way the Follow button distractingly pops up and down in the bottom right corner as I …
28-Dec-2020:
Anna Wiener in The New Yorker asks Is Substack the media future we want? I suppose that depends on what the alternatives are.
27-Dec-2020:
I finished reading Lisa Lutz’s The Swallows yesterday. A very disturbing subject — the sexual exploitation, ridicule and humiliation of young women at a …
24-Dec-2020:
I finally deleted my main Google account — the one I’ve been using as my primary email (Gmail) account since 2005. I’d intended to delete it in October, but …
23-Dec-2020:
Three Days of the Condor is at least as much a Christmas movie as Die Hard is. So there! 🍿
22-Dec-2020:
From Ted Gioia on Twitter:
The best decisions I’ve made ran counter to short-term incentives — often the people who prod you into “selling out” are poorly …
21-Dec-2020:
I’ve just sent out the third issue of my newsletter, Talk about books. This issue is titled Reading Wuthering Heights with aphantasia and there’ll be another …
18-Dec-2020:
I read Ulysses three times between 1993 and 1996. It’s time for a fourth reading if I can find my copy. I want to write — for my newsletter — about William …
15-Dec-2020:
The library can (in fact it frequently does) deliver satisfaction, but it is an autumnal satisfaction, one that looks beyond the mirage of permanent ownership. …
14-Dec-2020:
If you report it to customer services – you’ll likely be ignored. It makes me wish that there were public bug trackers for everything!
Terence Eden on the …
14-Dec-2020:
I said in previous post that I’d read nothing of le Carré’s since Smiley’s People. Thinking back, I see that I read all his novels up to that. I’ve wanted for …
14-Dec-2020:
John le Carré has died, aged 89. I loved some of his books, thought others were close to self-parody. I don’t think I’ve read anything later than Smiley’s …
13-Dec-2020:
Somebody who can recognizably be described as a “rat-faced little prick” really has no business being a justice of the US Supreme Court. Greg Olear suggests …
13-Dec-2020:
I loved Prince’s music, and he came up to me at the Grammys and said, “You really should write some dance music.” He didn’t say what kind of dance, so I wrote a …
12-Dec-2020:
Emily Olcott remembers the Jazz Standard, yet another venue closed permanently. A 9-minute read but well worth the time 🎹 🎶
12-Dec-2020:
I found out what was wrong with my Twitter summary cards, which weren’t displaying an image. I had left “www.” out of the image URL. That’s better. Should have …
11-Dec-2020:
I had read enough books to pick up on the fact that Genius is a personality-laundering scheme …
Two days ago, I hadn’t heard of Agnes Callard. Then @ayjay …
10-Dec-2020:
I just broke my favourite espresso cup (so favourite that it’s the only one I took with me when I moved) by pressing down too hard on the Aeropress. I’ll need …
10-Dec-2020:
On Crime Reads, Nick Kolakowski is describing Neil Jordan’s The Good Thief as “The best heist movie you’ve (probably) never seen”. Not only have I seen it …
10-Dec-2020:
I hope the Bad Sex award stays cancelled permanently. I’ve been saying for years that the Literary Review judges can’t tell the difference between bad writing …
08-Dec-2020:
I’m listening to Robert Glasper’s performance of Radiohead’s “Reckoner” (from his album Covered) for the second time in 20 minutes. I could happily listen to it …
08-Dec-2020:
I’m a bit sad to see the end of the Ikea catalogue, though it’s over a decade since I bought anything from Ikea (and the time before that was 1988), so I …
07-Dec-2020:
“The United States government, from the nineteen-thirties on, became a big insurance company, and it has not been running on an actuarially sound basis.”
The …
06-Dec-2020:
I’ve just sent out the second issue of my Substack newsletter, Talk about books. This issue’s called Dervla McTiernan’s female characters: The Rúin and The …
02-Dec-2020:
Novelist Alan Glynn on the appeal of doppelgängers in fiction and films.
01-Dec-2020:
Choose something you’re interested in and scroll to see more like it … Swipe to the left to see related topics and find more of the good stuff.
Mix is …
01-Dec-2020:
I just posted on my own site The judgment of critics. For most of my life I’ve believed that the paramount function of the critic was judgment. Then John …
01-Dec-2020:
I think I’ll have my bike back this afternoon. Tomorrow at the latest. And it’s bright and dry today! 🚲
30-Nov-2020:
Blogger Roland Denzel thinks that authors should stop writing about writing. I don’t recommend the post, which makes almost its whole point in the title, but it …
29-Nov-2020:
Now that I’m back on Twitter, I’ve been experimenting with adding “Twitter cards” to some of my static web pages, so that they’re more noticeable. I’m quite …
29-Nov-2020:
The pandemic restrictions are being relaxed from Tuesday in Ireland. First thing I’m going to do is get a new pair of shoes, without holes, and then I can be a …
29-Nov-2020:
I just posted something on Medium introducing my email newsletter. I know it’s been a few weeks since I wrote anything new on my own site, but don’t worry. This …
28-Nov-2020:
I like wearing a mask and interacting (at a safe distance) with other mask wearers. It seems I’m more likely to meet people’s eyes when I can’t see their mouths …
27-Nov-2020:
I don’t think I’ve been faced with a genuine dilemma for a long time, if ever. But I often find myself having to make a choice about something inconsequential. …
27-Nov-2020:
How academia resembles a drug gang (or why recently minted PhDs still live with their moms). Via Helen Lewis’s The Bluestocking newsletter.
26-Nov-2020:
We finally found those tapes from Ronnie’s.
Where Bill Evans had a residency in 1968 with Eddie Gomez and Jack DeJohnette. London Jazz News 🎶 🎹
26-Nov-2020:
Yesterday I said that, if the prompts lent themselves to it, I’d explain what I mean when I say I’ve sometimes been a hopeless optimist. Well, today’s does, …
25-Nov-2020:
Substack “Writers’ library” just emailed out a writing prompt: What does “home” mean to you? This wasn’t my reply, to my regret:
Why this is home, nor am I out …
25-Nov-2020:
I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I’d never heard of Clare Sheridan, sculptor, “middling novelist” and lover of Trotsky, among other things. Sounds like a …
25-Nov-2020:
It would never be accurate to call me a cockeyed optimist. I’ve sometimes described myself as “a hopeless optimist” but that involved a definition of optimism …
24-Nov-2020:
So, the same weekend that I renew my .ie domain name for a third year, I start a newsletter, rejoin Twitter and (finally) start to try to do something with my …
24-Nov-2020:
I studied law in Ireland in the 1970s and practised as a solicitor for about 6 years in the 80s. As my legal knowledge gets ever further out of date, I no …
23-Nov-2020:
During the 2 years I was off Twitter, I posted various bits of writing that I would certainly have shared there, if I’d still had an account. Like this: “What …
23-Nov-2020:
Yesterday, I sent out the first email from my new newsletter. Now all I need to do is capture some sign-ups. There’s been one microblogger so far. Thank you, …
22-Nov-2020:
I’ve posted the first issue of my Substack newsletter Talk about books. I’m planning to send it out every 2 weeks. I hope you find something in it worth reading …
22-Nov-2020:
Well, I did it, I signed up for Twitter again. Already, I can feel my anxiety rising, and I found myself thinking “I must remove that person from my feed reader …
22-Nov-2020:
I’m thinking about going back to Twitter after a gap of 2 years, mainly to try to drum up subscribers for this newsletter I’m about to start. But it’s striking …
22-Nov-2020:
With the Brexit transition period coming to an end, and agreement apparently still eluding the parties, the nature and effective location of the border between …
21-Nov-2020:
Sorry if I posted my microblogvember post for today twice. I was convinced I remembered posting it earlier but there’s no sign of it in the timeline or on …
21-Nov-2020:
I’m a little bit apprehensive about facing into winter here on the exposed, wind-and-rainswept west coast of Mayo, but only a little bit. I hope the pandemic …
21-Nov-2020:
I’ve been hesitant about starting a newsletter. When I was setting up my previous effort, “Recommended short fiction on Medium”, on Tinyletter, I tweeted that …
20-Nov-2020:
My Microblogvember post yesterday didn’t say quite what I wanted. I hope my enthusiasm isn’t beginning to fade. But it’s more likely the problem is that I went …
19-Nov-2020:
It’s generally been a principle of mine that one should be careful not to waste effort by attempting things that aren’t possible. In spite of that, I find I …
18-Nov-2020:
Throughout my 20s and into my 30s, I believed that society is founded on our mutual dependence and that capitalism, or the private ownership of the means of …
17-Nov-2020:
I found just four emails in my Spam folder. None of them was spam and one was about a delivery that I almost missed (I was still asleep) because I didn’t know …
17-Nov-2020:
Once the level 5 restrictions have been lifted, I’m going to get the train to Dublin and bring my bike down here. Between wet weather and lack of transport, …
16-Nov-2020:
Until my late 50s, I completely misunderstood the idea of memory. I didn’t realize that episodic memory is a thing, even though I often heard people describing …
15-Nov-2020:
Excellent “Quote of the day” on John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog yesterday. It’s from Robert Musil and states a truth both simple and obvious (though overlooked …
15-Nov-2020:
Since updating to Big Sur yesterday, I’ve been aware of an urge to change my MacBook Air’s screen back to the default resolution: the text and other elements …
15-Nov-2020:
I’ll be ending 2020 (and spending much of 2021) far from where I expected to be. But that will be nothing new. My motto was There is no Plan A, long before I …
14-Nov-2020:
Reading this BBC history of the ballpoint pen persuaded me that I should finally give up trying to write with a fountain pen. My writing’s always been messy and …
14-Nov-2020:
I decided not to be patient. I knew it was the right choice as soon as I heard the chime. The chime is back! Luckily, I don’t bring my Mac to libraries much any …
14-Nov-2020:
The progress bar on my Big Sur installation has been stalled just 3mm from the end for 45 minutes. Should I be patient?
14-Nov-2020:
I’m not normally a fan of Dusty Springfield — for example I hate how she sings the great Bacharach/David song “I just don’t know what to do with myself” — but …
14-Nov-2020:
I’ve written ✏️ another poem. I make no more claims for it than I did for the previous two. In fact, I think Ahistorical Survey is clearly better than this one. …
13-Nov-2020:
I’m quite pleased with myself: I just moved my bare foot in the nick of time out of the path of a falling pair of scissors (that I’d just dropped while opening …
13-Nov-2020:
But it’s not how it seems,
I will figure it out.
I guess now’s the right time.
How will I ever know?
…
Brace yourself, you only get one chance …
Lauren …
12-Nov-2020:
Lots to think about (and maybe react against) in this New Yorker piece by Hannah Arendt on W H Auden, published in 1975, just over a year after his death and …
12-Nov-2020:
It seems I’ll have to start ordering coffee online to get the espresso roast I like. I’ve never bothered grinding my own because I get through it too quickly …
12-Nov-2020:
In my previous post, I used the word “paths”, partly to stay within the character count, but also to avoid the pavement/sidewalk disagreement. “Pavements” was …
12-Nov-2020:
I was trying to travel light in France with just one pair of shoes, to which the rough paths did as much damage as to my suitcase. I didn’t have time to buy new …
12-Nov-2020:
Two to three years ago, Dan Belmont was one of the undsputed stars of short fiction on Medium. Then he took a 2-year break from writing. He’s back with a new …
12-Nov-2020:
Brexit will make it a nightmare for British musicians to perform in the EU, partly because member-states have different entry requirements. This means that they …
11-Nov-2020:
I’ve finally moved the entire 74,000 words of A Falling Body from Medium to www.artkavanagh.ie which I hope will be its final resting place. Reassembling the …
11-Nov-2020:
Since my work Windows notebook won’t boot up any more, I got a new Lenovo desktop. It’s nice having a big computer and screen again, even Windows. I’m tempted …
11-Nov-2020:
Reports of the death of Sean Connery reminded me of the existence of the “unofficial” Bond film, Never say never again, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen. …
10-Nov-2020:
I find that, without a conscious decision, I’ve given up crossdressing. My soon-to-be elderly legs no longer look presentable in a skirt or dress. I wish I’d …
10-Nov-2020:
Yet another reason to like Kamala Harris, from London Jazz News 🎶
09-Nov-2020:
The battery in my MacBook Air is at 5%. It’s threatening to go to sleep unless I plug it in, but it’s nearly my bedtime so I try to shut it down instead, only …
09-Nov-2020:
On Friday I was advising a writer on Medium who was worked up because he hadn’t been writing regularly for ages. I told him he shouldn’t try to force his …
08-Nov-2020:
Medium’s recent change of style and approach has made it more likely that I’ll post there (though I still intend to give priority to my own site, which is just …
08-Nov-2020:
I often joke that I’m a software, not a hardware, guy: able to make something ephemeral from bits (or ideas) but nothing with a palpable material existence. …
08-Nov-2020:
Advice: don’t read
A Clockwork Orange — it’s a foul farrago
Of made-up words that bite and bash and bleed.
I’ve written better books … So have other men, …
07-Nov-2020:
I bet Trump pardons himself and some members of his immediate family. Who else, I wonder?
07-Nov-2020:
Because of rain and wind, as well as catching up on work, I haven’t been out much to expore the environs of my new apartment. I think this afternoon I’ll take a …
06-Nov-2020:
Twitter says that when Trump leaves office he’ll lose protection as a “newsworthy individual”. This is rank hypocrisy: he’s unlikely to be any less newsworthy, …
06-Nov-2020:
I replaced my defunct Windows notebook with a desktop (really deskside). It’s been 14 years since I used a desktop and I overlooked the likelihood that it …
06-Nov-2020:
I’ve been editing HTML files with TextEdit and puzzling over how to do some things that work differently in other text editors, such as pattern matching/regex …
05-Nov-2020:
But all things are composed here
Like Nature, orderly and near:
In which we the dimensions find
Of that more sober age and mind,
Where larger-sized men did …
04-Nov-2020:
I love stills from stage plays. If the play is one I haven’t seen (as all of these are) I can’t help trying to guess at a dramatic scene that the pictures fit …
04-Nov-2020:
I just reread my long short story from early 2018, “Purpose of Amendment”. I can see there’s something there, but I rushed to get it out near to the referendum …
03-Nov-2020:
Sorry to hear that John Sessions has died. I liked him as an actor (particularly) and comedian, even if he did speak in support of UKIP! 📺
03-Nov-2020:
What a disappointment! I got an email from Caffè Nero, apparently offering me the chance to buy their “signature blend” online. Great, I thought, just what I …
03-Nov-2020:
I managed to astonish myself on Friday: I found a document in my suitcase showing that my after-tax income exceeds 3 times the rent on a studio in Pau/Tarbes. …
02-Nov-2020:
Stevens are 2 percent more likely to vote Trump, while Stephens are 14 percent more likely to vote Biden; Deborahs are for Biden, but Debras are for Trump.
Of …
02-Nov-2020:
Was it just yesterday I was thinking about leaving A Falling Body on Medium? I’m afraid it won’t work. The customizable themes apply only to posts listed on …
02-Nov-2020:
Blasted Windows: telling me I have “no internet” and that “the DNS server can’t be found” when the actual problem is that my battery is low and I need to plug …
02-Nov-2020:
I haven’t read any of the Jack Reacher books. I recently tried an Eddie Flynn (by Steve Cavanagh), reputedly similar. I found it an unexpected (but compelling) …
02-Nov-2020:
This is hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time. Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson (Thin Lizzy guitarists) don’t agree on anything. I saw the trio lineup …
02-Nov-2020:
25 Feel-Good Films You’ll Want to Watch Again—and Again. theatlantic.com via @dave
David Sims writes a whole paragraph on Inside Man (2006) without mentioning …
02-Nov-2020:
When, as a kid, I’d lose or forget something, an adult would urge me to concentrate, try to remember. I didn’t know how. I’d screw my eyes up in an attempt to …
01-Nov-2020:
Now that Medium allows use of a sans font and personalized theme, I might just leave A Falling Body there instead of moving it to my own site as I’d planned. …
01-Nov-2020:
It’s the beginning of the month, so I have three new free reads on Medium. I’d been saving some articles that looked interesting but not enough to resume my …
01-Nov-2020:
I bought Brad Mehldau’s last two trio albums Blues and Ballads (2016) and Seymour Reads the Constitution! (2018) within a short time of each other and I’ve been …
01-Nov-2020:
I just posted Who needs independent booksellers? It’s a question my answers to which haven’t been consistent over the years. I don’t think I’m alone in that 📖
01-Nov-2020:
We’ve been getting a lot of rain. The carpark opposite my new apartment was flooded Thursday, dried out on Friday and flooded again yesterday. I wouldn’t call …
30-Oct-2020:
Ursula Le Guin introduces herself
I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times …
30-Oct-2020:
Sharing the internet with America is like sharing your living room with a rhinoceros. It’s huge, it’s right there, and whatever it’s doing now, you sure as hell …
29-Oct-2020:
Is this a coincidence or does it just seem like one? I listened to the Labèque sisters’ album Love of Colours today for the first time in at least 7 or 8 years …
28-Oct-2020:
I just posted “Lining figures” in Microsoft Word: You learn something new every now and then on LinkedIn.
28-Oct-2020:
… when my last book came out someone wrote an article naming me as ‘a forgotten writer’… I suppose I didn’t write enough. You mustn’t let too many years go by …
28-Oct-2020:
Please enter your telephone number as a continuous string without spaces or dashes.
Why, do you not have some way of stripping out spaces and dashes?
26-Oct-2020:
In fact I feel more like a drummer … I try to make the piano sing, although it’s really a percussion instrument. I get a great feeling when I use it as …
26-Oct-2020:
The plural use of “advancements” seems quite new. I’ve been seeing it a lot where I’d once have expected “advances”, as in “technological advance{ment}s”. I …
26-Oct-2020:
Lithium-ion batteries are believed to have been responsible for at least 250 fires at recycling and waste facilities across the UK in the year to March 2020. …
25-Oct-2020:
I just posted Writers on writing. A list of pieces/posts etc. available to read on the web in which writers discuss aspects of the craft, process or experience …
24-Oct-2020:
I’ve been wanting to order some books (from, for example, Kennys.ie) for several months now but I was holding off until I had a more-or-less permanent address …
23-Oct-2020:
Having stayed in cheapish hotels for the past 13 weeks (mostly in France) I’ve finally found somewhere to live for the next year. It’s in the bleak far west of …
23-Oct-2020:
The Sunna Gunnlaugs trio was supposed to be playing live in Poland today (I think it’s today) but is streaming from Iceland, where they live, instead. I don’t …
22-Oct-2020:
My favourite coffee in France was Lavazza’s Il Perfetto Espresso, but I found some very acceptable cheaper alternatives, including Lidl’s Bellarom E[sx]presso. …
21-Oct-2020:
Richard Williams on The news from Keith Jarrett 🎶 🎹
21-Oct-2020:
Keith Jarrett is unlikely to perform again, after two strokes in 2018 left him unable to use his left hand. This is very sad for him personally, but we have the …
21-Oct-2020:
From Melville House Press’s Moby blog: Booksta-what? I can’t see the appeal myself. I’m obviously not going to use a Facebook product, but I did try out the …
20-Oct-2020:
Jonathan Carroll, Moving day in your head: what it’s like to start writing a new book.
20-Oct-2020:
”fast, strong, cheap and impossible to use”
That (according to the New Yorker) is graphene, no. 6 on a list of Technologies that are just about to solve big …
19-Oct-2020:
I’ve just posted “Short stories on the web”, a list of short stories (not by me!) that I recommend and that can be read online. I previously maintained this …
15-Oct-2020:
I must say I like the new customizable profiles on Medium and the redesign generally, particularly the fonts. Finally, I can use a sans font for body text. It’s …
15-Oct-2020:
Emily Hughes, A definitive ranking of Tana French novels, on Electric Literature
15-Oct-2020:
I just tripped over the USB-C cable that is charging my MacBook Air … and I’m delighted to discover that it actually works better than the old MagSafe, with …
14-Oct-2020:
It’s time we treat Facebook for what it is: A media company, subject to the norms, responsibilities, and behaviors we all expect and demand from our media …
13-Oct-2020:
Something weird is happening with Google
I start to type a search term, Google does its autocomplete thing and (as usual) suggests a phrase completely different from the one I want to search for. I …
13-Oct-2020:
Till I watched Stana Katic (“Castle”) apparently speaking precise, formal French aimed primarily at intelligibilty (on French tv, version française), I hadn’t …
13-Oct-2020:
The reference to keg beer as “weasel piss” was one of the things that jogged my memory about “Country”. When I saw the 📺 play I hadn’t yet tasted English beer …
13-Oct-2020:
I turned over to BBC4 last night and caught the last 10 minutes of a play that I recognized as “Country” by Trevor Griffiths. I’d seen it (for the only time) …
11-Oct-2020:
My wife and I both had coronavirus and we were lucky to get it early. I have asthma and so I was quite worried about it. My wife got it from her book group … …
10-Oct-2020:
A new post by me: Anxiety after all. I think I may be experiencing a generalized (I call it unspecific) anxiety, in which anxious feelings survive and persist …
09-Oct-2020:
Because I studied and briefly taught poetry in a university, I habitually think of poetry as something to be interpreted, described, criticized and commented …
07-Oct-2020:
I just revived (briefly) my Mix account, which I’d deactivated in Dec 2019. Not only have I retained most of my followers through 10 months of inactivity — …
07-Oct-2020:
Do you think that Google deliberately steers traffic away from Garrett Camp’s Mix.com? I had assumed it was so hard to find relevant hits because the site name …
06-Oct-2020:
I just started to download Catalina 10.15.7 update. Initially, it was reporting “about 13 hours remaining” and I thought about cancelling the download. Then it …
05-Oct-2020:
… people with SDAM tend to do particularly well in jobs that require abstract thinking … “We think SDAM people, through a lifetime of practice of not having …
05-Oct-2020:
A new short story by me, “A slip of the masc”. A gender-nonconforming man attends the cremation of his ex-wife and uses the occasion to review his life and …
03-Oct-2020:
Speaking about women jazz pianists (and Poland, where Sunna Gunnlaugs will be touring in a few weeks), the CD/trio discussed in this review from London Jazz …
03-Oct-2020:
Icelandic jazz pianist Sunna Gunnlaugs emailed her list telling us that on the first Friday of each month since the pandemic began, Bandcamp waives its 15% fee, …
02-Oct-2020:
While editing my earlier post about France, memory and live jazz, it struck me how very peculiar it is that I’m in Toulouse in October yet not going to attend …
02-Oct-2020:
I just posted “France, memory and live jazz: Once, in real time, without a rehearsal”. It’s partly a continuation of my post from 2 weeks ago, “I think I’m …
02-Oct-2020:
Jimmy Stewart rates me … Vertigo! A much better than usual 7 out of 10 in today’s Irish Times Movie Quiz … with the help of several lucky guesses.
02-Oct-2020:
It seems that Medium has gone back to indicating — with a little star after “x min read” — which stories on its home page are behind the paywall, i.e. almost …
02-Oct-2020:
Adrian Chiles of The Guardian on being diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. I read stories like this obsessively, even though I don’t believe that I have …
01-Oct-2020:
I thought for a moment I’d lost my iPod Touch. I bought it earlier this year, before the announcement of the current iPhone SE, and used its newness to resist …
01-Oct-2020:
That entire £1.67 billion arts package is being used to mothball some of the larger enterprises but none of it is reaching the workforce.
Aaron Liddard on the …
29-Sep-2020:
Learning to love (or at least use) Apple’s unlamented butterfly keyboard
Shortly after Apple announced the 2020 MacBook Air, I bought a refurbished 2019 model, so I could find out at first hand what the butterfly key switches feel …
29-Sep-2020:
What is the purpose of literary criticism? Rumaan Alam interviews Charles Finch on Slate. Interesting assumption that criticism equates to book reviews. It does …
28-Sep-2020:
There’s a superb version of Paul McCartney’s “Great Day” on the Brad Mehldau Trio album Seymour Reads the Constitution! Somehow I always tune out during it and …
28-Sep-2020:
I’m usually good at cancelling trial subscriptions that I don’t want to renew but I’ve just taken out a year’s sub to The New Yorker. I overlooked it because I …
28-Sep-2020:
For the past 9 years, most of the books I had acquired up to then were inaccessible, languishing at the back of my sister’s attic. Last Thursday, I went to sort …
28-Sep-2020:
Mike Collins (jazzyblogman) has posted a roundup of recent reviews he’s written for London Jazz News. I’ll check out the Peter Hum, whose Ottawa Citizen jazz …
28-Sep-2020:
I’m downloading my Gmail archive from Google, in preparation for deleting my account. The total size is 3.9GB. I went to bed having spent 4½ hours downloading, …
27-Sep-2020:
Somebody goes to the trouble of splitting a post/essay/article into 280-character chunks so as to tweet it and then someone else asks a Thread Reader app to …
26-Sep-2020:
While waiting to recover some print books, I finished Karin Alvtegen’s Betrayal in Apple Books. I had read it before but remembered nothing at all. A realistic …
26-Sep-2020:
Following a visit to my sister’s attic on Thursday, I now have some print books to read again: Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love and two by Michael Dibdin: Ratking and …
25-Sep-2020:
Alan Ralph has written a detailed and perceptive reply to my post from Wednesday about where RSS is or ought to be going.
23-Sep-2020:
A new post by me: Where to now for RSS? I may well be suggesting something that’s been considered and rejected (for good reasons) several times over. If I am, …
23-Sep-2020:
Here’s @ayjay on the way “gaslighting” is currently being used. I’ve been suspicious of this usage without having thought through exactly what about it was …
21-Sep-2020:
I love the fact that you can set up Safari to use Reader View automatically with particular sites. I had done this already with Wikipedia. Now I’ve done it with …
20-Sep-2020:
The Irish Times’s insistence on serving up a mobile site to Safari 14 on a MacBook Air is making me want to throw somebody out the window. I’ve tried changing …
20-Sep-2020:
I hate maps embedded on web pages. They’re often too small to be useful, and if you use a trackpad, you’ll be scrolling down a page and suddenly find you’ve …
18-Sep-2020:
Now I’m getting the desktop version of The Irish Times on iPad and the mobile version on MacBook Air (Safari 14). The world really has turned upside down. I was …
17-Sep-2020:
Since I installed Safari 14, The Irish Times is showing me what looks like a mobile version of their site, with a very annoying back-to-the-top arrow at the …
17-Sep-2020:
With 1.4GB of the 5.27GB downloaded so far, the speed has dropped to 233KB per second and the estimated time left is still over 4 hours.
17-Sep-2020:
I’m trying to download a Windows recovery ISO image (5.27GB) over a hotel wifi connection at about 300KB per second. And I’m not even sure it’s going to work …
17-Sep-2020:
Oh, so that’s where the expression “be kind, rewind” comes from. I’m old enough to have had a collection of vinyl LPs in the 1970s but somehow VHS passed me by. …
17-Sep-2020:
I’ve just posted “I think I’m finally over France: I may have been trying to relive my experiences in actuality because I can’t recapture them in memory”
16-Sep-2020:
I know I’ve said this before but I really don’t get the impetus towards ever thinner bezels. I’ve got the 3rd generation iPad Air and I find the side bezels …
16-Sep-2020:
iPadOS 14: I’m seeing “Update requested” and “Estimating time remaining” for 20 minutes now. Maybe I’ll give up and try again tonight … or next week ☹️
16-Sep-2020:
I finished reading Doug Johnstone’s Hit & Run last night, as iPad battery reached 2%. Fairly compelling plot, but I can’t understand how others were so …
14-Sep-2020:
I’ve started to read Doug Johnstone’s Hit & Run, which I found in Apple Books library. I must have downloaded it when it was free. Plot is OK (crime boss …
13-Sep-2020:
It’s no defence (or mitigation) to say that breach of treaty obligations will be “specific and limited”. Most infringements are. I really don’t want to think …
13-Sep-2020:
Roger Stone … has said Trump should seize total power and jail prominent figures including Bill and Hillary Clinton and Mark Zuckerberg if he loses to Joe Biden …
12-Sep-2020:
I just tried to read a story on LitHub and got this monstrosity. Neither of the apparent “buttons” — “Accept all” or “Read more …” — responds to being clicked …
11-Sep-2020:
Rooting about on an external hard disk that I hadn’t paid much attention to recently, I find that I’ve got all of the first 4 seasons of Orphan Black. I don’t …
11-Sep-2020:
I’ve just posted Even plainer text. A suggestion for writing a basically structured document in plain (i.e. UTF-8) text without reference to an external style …
11-Sep-2020:
Someone who doesn’t need to tell you how clever they are while doing something clever is a political journalist’s nightmare. Tactical boringness is a great …
11-Sep-2020:
I’m having to skip my coffee this morning so I’m not in the best of moods. I’ll make up for it in the afternoon, though ☕️
11-Sep-2020:
Social media itself is not the existential threat. Rather, it’s the way that social media surfaces and amplifies the worst of humanity.
Wired. The problem is …
10-Sep-2020:
Pianist Marc Copland writes about the significance and genius of Gary Peacock whom he knew since 1983 and who died a few days ago 🎹 🎶
09-Sep-2020:
Martyn Turner cartoon in The Irish Times
08-Sep-2020:
I got an email from a mailing list to my old address saying at the bottom “If you’ve changed your email address, update your account details”. So I logged on to …
07-Sep-2020:
I’m excited at the prospect of an album by pianist Dominik Wania but I sort of wish it wasn’t a solo album on ECM, which is likely to be subdued and restrained. …
07-Sep-2020:
Of the dozen or so pieces I’ve posted about aphantasia and related topics, the two most important in my view are Aphantasia’s effect on executive function and …
06-Sep-2020:
Another book that had been sitting in my Apple Books library and I finally got around to reading is Yrsa Sigurðardóttir’s Last Rituals. Gruesome, bloody and …
05-Sep-2020:
The great bassist Gary Peacock has died. I’m just going to listen to some of his duets with Marc Copland (piano) 🎶🎹
03-Sep-2020:
I posted something this morning, saying that I’d seen The Matrix only once, hadn’t liked it and thought it was time that I watched it again, 18 years later. And …
02-Sep-2020:
I bought a cheap (not Apple) USB-C adapter to read my old USB drive on the MacBook Air. I couldn’t see it in the Finder, so I tried various diskutil and mount …
30-Aug-2020:
I just posted WhatsApp? Nothing much. Today is the day when I finally delete my WhatsApp account. I’ve posted the story on Medium rather than my own site, for …
29-Aug-2020:
The girl is instantly plunged into Vittoria’s maelstrom, a swirl of tragic backstories, reckless driving, teeming extended families, chain-smoking, and priests. …
29-Aug-2020:
I’ve reluctantly removed Tot from the menu bar on the Mac and added it to the Dock instead. When it’s in the menu bar, it seems that menu commands (e.g. toggle …
29-Aug-2020:
I’m bemused at how much Google’s Material Design has been lauded and imitated. Personally, I find it meh at best, both on Android and in Google’s apps.
So says …
28-Aug-2020:
If Hugh O’Flaherty could be forced to resign from the Supreme Court 21 years ago, just for asking the Dublin County Registrar to list a case (which was then …
27-Aug-2020:
In August 1970 Miles was moving from a freer version of the complex music his quintet played in the second half of the ’60s to a direct engagement with funk. …
26-Aug-2020:
Trying to type in the dark on a keyboard without a backlight, I realize that my touch-typing is not as good as I thought it was. The keyboard is quiet but table …
26-Aug-2020:
Adam Roberts did not find it straightforward to format an ebook and send it into the world
You know who ne’er must deale with swich annoys?
Kates, Virgile, …
25-Aug-2020:
I haven’t any printed books to read for now so I’ve been excavating my Apple Books library. I just read Andrew Taylor’s The American Boy which has been sitting …
25-Aug-2020:
The Irish Times has a go at ranking Christopher Nolan’s films. I used to try to persuade myself that he’d made another film almost as good as Memento. He …
23-Aug-2020:
I’m watching Destroyer, directed by Karyn Kusama and starring Nicole Kidman (also Tatiana Maslany, looking nothing like an Orphan Black clone), on tv (Canal+). …
23-Aug-2020:
Hey, Google, it looks like it hasn’t occurred to you that the fact that there aren’t any hits for my search term might be telling me exactly what I wanted to …
23-Aug-2020:
I Googled find free articles Medium and I got lots of hits telling me how to circumvent the paywall and read premium articles. If I wanted to read premium …
22-Aug-2020:
A new post by me Reading poetry in scholarly editions ✏️
20-Aug-2020:
Malcolm Gladwell has a theory of mystery/thriller/detective fiction. Where I think it falls down is in the idea of “the Northern”, in which category he includes …
20-Aug-2020:
Here’s a short story by Dearbhaile Houston, who is working on a collection of short stories. The title is Viscera and it’s about dissecting the entrails of an …
19-Aug-2020:
The public middle school in Menlo Park, where Schaake now resides, has students who are homeless, although the area’s average home value is almost $2.5 million. …
16-Aug-2020:
I don’t own any Sonny Clark albums (and I’m pleasantly surprised to learn that he recorded a relatively substantial amount before his early death), so I’m …
15-Aug-2020:
The New Yorker has a new story by Haruki Murakami. And this: “You Are My Dear Friend”, by Madhuri Vijay, the story of a thirtyish former au pair who marries a …
15-Aug-2020:
Better to wallow in self-pity over nothing than to have actually screwed up your life.
Ted Chiang, Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom, a long short story …
14-Aug-2020:
The view from my hotel room in Pau, Pyrénées Atlantiques.
13-Aug-2020:
I’ve just posted the third and final part of A good masculinity is hard to find. The third part is subtitled “Gender as behaviour” and in it I reexamine beliefs …
11-Aug-2020:
I’m planning to delete my Google account in October, having used Gmail as my email provider for 15 years. I am very tempted to just zap it and take my chances …
09-Aug-2020:
I quite often find myself wondering why I’m still following John Naughton. Then he links to something like this — Ted Gioia, Why Gregory Bateson matters — and …
09-Aug-2020:
I wish iPadOS had the option to type curly single quotes by default but straight double ones. The could call it “really smart quotes”.
08-Aug-2020:
I’ve seen a wild boar fairly close, when it crossed a remote country road in front of me. I don’t think I’d have chased after one, even if it had stolen my …
08-Aug-2020:
Mark Dawson just revealed a corrupt system, writes Annika Karody on the Melville House blog. Dawson is a brilliant marketer but (on the strength of the only …
07-Aug-2020:
Excel doesn’t offer the option to turn off this auto-formatting, and the only way to avoid it is to change the data type for individual columns.
Scientists …
07-Aug-2020:
I assumed from the moment that I first heard about wireless charging that it must be wasteful and inefficient as compared with the old fashioned, wired, …
07-Aug-2020:
Jason Kottke has a chili recipe “concocted through practice and improvisation” by one of the most influential musical improvisors ever 🎶
06-Aug-2020:
Here’s a new short story by Naoise Dolan, Family News told from the point of view of an effectively homeless woman who has moved in with her older sister and …
06-Aug-2020:
The Guardian has great pictures from the Isle of Wight festival, 1970, including a pensive Jimi Hendrix and drummer Clive Bunker in full flight. No Miles Davis, …
02-Aug-2020:
I mentioned yesterday that I hand-edit the JSON feed from my personal site. I noticed this morning that JSONLint, the validator I’ve been using, has stopped …
02-Aug-2020:
Another off-cut from my thesis: “Prelate of the grove”: A note on ambition and preferment in Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House” ✏️
Andrew Marvell was no admirer …
01-Aug-2020:
Panic over. I Googled the MacBook Air keyboard problem and it turns out all I needed to do was hold down Cmd-Opt-p-r while booting up. I don’t know what that …
01-Aug-2020:
I edit the JSON feed from my personal site by hand. Realizing that I can’t use the MacBook Air, and having to rely on the iPad Air instead, I felt a moment’s …
01-Aug-2020:
By me: Writing “plain” text. These days, I at least start off most of my writing as unformatted text, the kind I refuse to describe as “plain”. So, maybe I …
01-Aug-2020:
The keyboard on my 2 month old refurbished 2019 MacBook Air, seems to have stopped working. The computer wouldn’t respond, so I rebooted it and now I can’t …
31-Jul-2020:
I’ve just finished reading Kate Atkinson’s Transcription. The end is very satisfying: at once clarifying and confusing, which is appropriate to the theme. It …
30-Jul-2020:
Here’s a very new short story by Niamh Campbell, whose “Love Many” won this year’s Sunday Times Audible award: In An Encounter, a journalist interviewing a poet …
30-Jul-2020:
I’m halfway through Kate Atkinson’s Transcription and enjoying it. With another writer, I’d worry about where this plot is going but Atkinson has a sure touch. …
30-Jul-2020:
After 15 years on Gmail, I’ve switched to Zoho mail (with my own domain name on top). Just now, I noticed that the fan on the MacBook Air was going like the …
29-Jul-2020:
A new post by me: Tech’s unfulfilled promises. Tech held out the promise of helping to free humanity from drudgery, boredom and hard physical work. Obviously, …
28-Jul-2020:
Somewhat ironically, I wrote the previous micropost in a coffee shop because I don’t have a home just yet and I badly needed a coffee. It’s very nice coffee, so …
28-Jul-2020:
Emily Temple asks Is this the end of writing in cafés? I like the idea of writing in cafés, but in practice I tend to drink coffee in cafés and write at home …
26-Jul-2020:
I spent the years between 1988 and 2011 outside Ireland, apart from the occasional visit, but until Friday evening it had been 5 years since I had left the …
26-Jul-2020:
Two months ago, following the release of the 2020 MacBook Air with magic keyboard, I got a refurb 2019 one, partly out of curiosity about the butterfly …
26-Jul-2020:
I’ve been trying to attract some friends and family members away from WhatsApp, so I can avoid making even the tiniest contribution to Facebook’s continued …
26-Jul-2020:
I haven’t posted anything for nearly a week. I had been planning to move from Ireland to France back in March, but that had to be delayed for obvious reasons. …
20-Jul-2020:
The Register reports that “no logging” VPN providers have been storing plain text logs (including passwords) on publicly accessible servers. I’m shocked. …
19-Jul-2020:
Ha! As soon as I posted this, I went back to Tot on the Mac and, sure enough, it’s now showing today’s edits from the iPad. So I know what to do the next time …
19-Jul-2020:
I had been hoping that using Tot on both iPad and MacBook Air would solve the problems I’ve been having syncing text documents between the two using iCloud. No …
18-Jul-2020:
Here’s a marvellous piece in The Guardian Saturday Review by Chris Power, author of the collection Mothers, about reading short stories. It’s full of links: a …
17-Jul-2020:
Suppose the Twitter Bitcoin scam was a kind of decoy to make the world think that the scammers were narrowly focused on crypto and/or too stupid to understand …
16-Jul-2020:
Max Schrems wins another round against Facebook, the European Commission and the Irish Data Protection Commissioner.
16-Jul-2020:
If anything, our results show that Branwell is the least likely member of the Brontë family to have contributed to Wuthering Heights.
A study by two digital …
16-Jul-2020:
Unlike Nazism, Marxism wants of course to save victims, but it thinks that the process that makes victims is fundamentally economic.
says René Girard. I don’t …
15-Jul-2020:
The zig and zag of rupture and reconciliation makes Normal People mostly a picaresque and inconclusive romance, but also a millennial photo album.
Lorrie Moore …
14-Jul-2020:
Google Translate pops up a warning about “Upcoming changes to history”. I think they might be on to something.
14-Jul-2020:
It’s been a while since I’ve seen one of these. Nice to know that some sites are still taking their GDPR obligations seriously 😉
14-Jul-2020:
a truth universally unacknowledged … another of the unknown knowns
Fintan O’Toole on what Ireland gained from having Jack Charlton manage our national football …
14-Jul-2020:
Tim Andersen, PhD, I do not believe in the multiverse, the case for realism. Yeah, what he said.
12-Jul-2020:
Trump reportedly suggested selling Puerto Rico after hurricane Maria, according to his acting secretary of Homeland Security at the time. Perhaps a management …
12-Jul-2020:
I’m glad that Micro.blog allows me to fix mistakes in posts. I’ve always understood in theory why Twitter won’t permit tweets to be amended but in practice the …
12-Jul-2020:
Last week I posted part 1 of “A good masculinity is hard to find”. Here’s Part 2 — gender as identity. I’m afraid it’s going to annoy most of its readers. …
10-Jul-2020:
As I’ve said several times, here and elsewhere, I’m not a fan of ebooks. Here’s the contrary view, from a former Micro.blogger.
10-Jul-2020:
In our restaurant that has two stars. In our restaurant that is now a hostile environment of pervasive sexual misconduct.
Sarah Gilmartin’s short story, The …
08-Jul-2020:
Why is it so hard to change your email address on a subscription? I want to stop using Gmail (finally), and I’ve changed my email address on my paid …
07-Jul-2020:
Stephanie Soileau, Last One Out Shut Off the Lights. A short story from her new collection 📖
06-Jul-2020:
So, Morricone is dead. I’m not on a music subscription service, and unfortunately can’t share a playlist. Instead, here are 3 🎶links🎹:
Ninfa plebea Mio caro …
05-Jul-2020:
A new post by me: “A good masculinity is hard to find: Part 1 – episodes from the early life of an antimasculine male”. The first of three intended posts on the …
04-Jul-2020:
OK, the fix for that Tot bug is straightforward, if counterintuitive. I set up a text replacement, ||, for straight double quotes and turned smart quotes on …
04-Jul-2020:
I think I’ve just found a bug-disguised-as-a-feature in Tot for the Mac. I’ve been happily using Tot for weeks and I’m amazed I haven’t noticed till now. It’s …
04-Jul-2020:
Niamh Campbell’s Love Many, to which I have already linked, is a deserving winner of the Sunday Times Audible award. I’m wary, though, of the notion that …
01-Jul-2020:
Here’s a short story by Felicia C Sullivan, “Even the Toaster Couldn’t Be Trusted: A short story about women who sleep with their eyes open”. It’s behind the …
30-Jun-2020:
Richard Williams has been listening to Lucio Battisti. By chance, I first heard of Battisti only recently when listening to an album by Doctor 3 dedicated to …
30-Jun-2020:
Probably I’m missing something but I can’t help feeling that Modern Monetary Theory is just a catchy new name for something that should be obvious to anyone …
30-Jun-2020:
Magpie sheltering from the rain.
29-Jun-2020:
I am advised to “shield”, keep my head in my shell, isolate with some minimal bubble socialising. Till when? Vaccine or virus extinction. Somewhere over the …
28-Jun-2020:
It makes a change to read a review of an album that I already have, Brad Mehldau’s Suite: April 2020. I haven’t got the vinyl edition of course, but a digital …
28-Jun-2020:
After a gap of about 2 months, Marks & Spencer have got their ground espresso ☕️ back in stock, and it’s sooooo much nicer than what I’ve been making do …
28-Jun-2020:
The sheer number of markets Google dominates — mobile operating systems, general search, online video, mapping, email, display advertising, and browsers — lets …
27-Jun-2020:
By me: PDF is preferable to ePub, even on small screens. Long form texts, including fiction, may lose readers when posted as multiple HTML pages. I think I’ve …
26-Jun-2020:
It’s just struck me that the app/feature I’d most like to see in iPadOS is the MacOS Preview. Preview is great for all sorts of graphic things but it’s …
26-Jun-2020:
This is probably an accurate reading of the situation, if a bit cynical. Richard Murphy on Starmer’s sacking of Long-Bailey.
25-Jun-2020:
Most of the books recommended by Stephen M Tomic (see previous post) are Kindle only. Here’s one that isn’t (though international orders are suspended for now). …
25-Jun-2020:
A few years ago, when I was sending out my weekly newsletter, “Recommended short fiction on Medium”, Stephen M Tomic was among the top writers I recommended. …
25-Jun-2020:
A fleeting chance to share an intimate gig with Fred Hersch on piano and Esperanza Spalding, here on vocals alone, without her bass.
The piano-bass duo is …
25-Jun-2020:
So, Bookshop.org will be coming to the UK. (I’m not in the UK, of course, but I buy some books through Alibris.) I think this is broadly good, notwithstanding …
25-Jun-2020:
While I’m on the subject of Keen: I think that the pundits who are comparing it to Pinterest are missing the point. Sure, Pinterest describes itself as a visual …
25-Jun-2020:
I’m conflicted about Google’s experimental Keen: I’d love to ignore it, although I’ve speculated before that AI-driven search and recommendation engines may …
24-Jun-2020:
I don’t usually like audiobooks — without something to keep my eyes occupied, my attention tends to wander — but I’ve been enjoying listening to Helen Lewis …
24-Jun-2020:
I’m sorry to see the end of the Segway though as a cyclist I’m predisposed to think that any trip that could be made on a Segway could more easily be made on a …
22-Jun-2020:
television productions of Shakespeare diverted people from the text and delivered them into the hands of a director.
John Henry Jones, paraphrasing his …
22-Jun-2020:
I was culling feeds in NetNewsWire yesterday, mainly expunging those whose content is largely tech-related, and I considered removing Jason Kottke’s. I decided …
22-Jun-2020:
Forgotten plays: No 4 – Howard Brenton’s Bloody Poetry (1984). I saw a revival of this play in the early 90s. I’d read, not seen, some of his early agitprop; …
21-Jun-2020:
I’ve noticed that when I post fiction in multiple parts, the first part gets page views but these drop off quickly. So, as an alternative to proceeding to part …
20-Jun-2020:
I’ve been using Gmail as my main email provider since 2005. I never bothered to move because Google must long since know everything worth knowing about me. …
20-Jun-2020:
Today’s Diverted Traffic from the London Review of Books is William Empson’s Fairy Flight in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I’ve read it before (I think it’s in one …
19-Jun-2020:
Democrats live in permanent fear of losing and trust the powers that be to pick someone whom they think other people would like.
I was starting to think …
19-Jun-2020:
Venez nombreux et masqués faire la fête du jazz …
The Sunside is probably my favourite jazz club but it’s tiny. The thought of large numbers of people there, …
19-Jun-2020:
Enrico Terrinoni, the Italian translator of Joyce’s works, writes about Joyce’s affinity with Giordano Bruno and Bruno’s presence in Ulysses 📚
18-Jun-2020:
Just as my 3-month Deezer free trial subscription ends, here comes Spotify offering me 3 months for the price of one. However, I think I should forget about …
17-Jun-2020:
Apple removed subpixel antialiasing from macOS in 2018, the same month it retired its last non-retina notebook.
Niki Tonsky explains why (and how) you should …
17-Jun-2020:
The card I use to pay my phone provider expired 2 months ago. I paid last month’s bill as a one-off but couldn’t find how to update the card. I’ve since made …
14-Jun-2020:
I’ve updated the list of aphantasia posts on my personal site to add this morning’s I forgot the future and added a new MB category, Aphantasia.
14-Jun-2020:
Hiding from history: Conservative party deletes archive of speeches from internet. Originally posted by @Dave
14-Jun-2020:
I’ve just posted I forgot the future: SDAM, aphantasia and a purpose in life. Before I knew I had aphantasia and SDAM, a psychotherapist asked me what I wanted …
14-Jun-2020:
Living with his family under restricted movement in the Netherlands during the pandemic, Brad Mehldau wrote and recorded an unscheduled and unexpected solo …
14-Jun-2020:
As an island on the periphery of Europe, we should have expected a lower fatality rate than countries like Germany, Denmark, Portugal, Finland and many others. …
13-Jun-2020:
It was okay to publish the now-discredited Steele dossier, because Trump is scum.
So says Matt Taibbi sarcastically in a newsletter that @Dave linked to. I …
10-Jun-2020:
What [governments] actually promise is to accept the money that only they can create to settle the tax liabilities that only they can impose. And that is …
09-Jun-2020:
While I was without a Mac, I installed the Linux subsystem for Windows, primarily so that I could run the bash wc command on text files to get their wordcounts. …
09-Jun-2020:
A short story by Niamh Campbell, “Love Many”, shortlisted for The Sunday Times Audible short story award ✏️
08-Jun-2020:
“The Lost Generation, a short story by Rosemary Jenkinson about a school reunion after 25 years, from her collection Lifestyle Choice 10mg 📚
08-Jun-2020:
I got 17/30 or 57% in the font game. I’m annoyed that I got Myriad wrong, as I previously used it a lot. And I misidentified both Helvetica and Arial.
07-Jun-2020:
Emily Temple’s (first) novel, The Lightness is out. I’ll probably wait for the mass-market paperback (as is my wont), though I’ve been looking forward to it for …
07-Jun-2020:
It’s hard to judge whether one’s monthly subscriptions are good value. I don’t pay anything to The Guardian but every so often there’s a message at the bottom …
07-Jun-2020:
Buying the wrong things, part 2. I don’t own a coffee grinder (because I get through it so quickly it doesn’t have time to lose flavour). Yesterday, distracted …
07-Jun-2020:
Ah, now I see. It’s still possible to use Option as a compose key; but to get a circumflex you use Option-6 rather than Option-i. Option + a vowel will give an …
07-Jun-2020:
I seem to have developed a talent for buying the wrong things. I meant to buy two novellas from MHP’s ebook sale, one of them being Wells’s The Time Machine, …
07-Jun-2020:
One thing I’ve noticed about my recently purchased 2019 MacBook Air is that it no longer seems to be possible to use the keyboard to “compose” characters. If I …
07-Jun-2020:
Week 12 (already?!) of Melville House Press’s ebook sale features “a fantastic selection of novellas for $1.99”. Dostoevsky to Edgar Allan Poe, by way of Henry …
06-Jun-2020:
Paolo Amoroso, a former Micro.blogger, recommends a new blog directory. It’s called FindYour.blog.
06-Jun-2020:
I’m going to take out a trial, digital-only sub to The New Yorker, largely so I can read short stories by Alice Munro and others. I don’t intend to renew once …
04-Jun-2020:
I’m still watching Stumptown for now, though it’s not getting any better. In last night’s episode a singer’s manager encouraged an obsessed fan to stalk her, to …
02-Jun-2020:
I’ve been trying to avoid using the word “lockdown” because I don’t believe it’s accurate. I’ve been getting out to walk the dog every day and don’t feel that …
02-Jun-2020:
I haven’t read any of Alice Munro’s short stories. I caught Almodovar’s film Julieta on tv at the weekend and was surprised to see in the credits that it’s …
02-Jun-2020:
Hey, I got 7 out of 10 in this Irish Times quiz about Normal People. I watched only the first episode of the tv series and I haven’t yet reread the book (having …
01-Jun-2020:
Erica Sadun enthuses about the MacOS Preview app, and offers a workshop on its little-known features. It may be the app I missed most when I was without a Mac, …
01-Jun-2020:
London Jazz News will not be posting tomorrow 🎶
01-Jun-2020:
Total Recall at 30: a thrilling reminder of Paul Verhoeven at his best. My favourite Verhoeven movie, even better than Starship Troopers 🍿
31-May-2020:
My final example of book cover art (🎨 day 7) is another Italian book that I knew nothing about until its cover caught my attention and I Googled it. I read a …
31-May-2020:
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week …
30-May-2020:
The luminous background colour, the stylized figure, the spare font: this cover is so eyecatching that you wonder why everybody doesn’t do something like this. …
29-May-2020:
I saw this cover and immediately thought “That’s a book I’m going to read”. I’m not sure exactly why (and I still haven’t read it, but it won’t be long now) but …
28-May-2020:
I don’t know what edition of Wuthering Heights this is, but I love the cover (as well as the book). The unkerned, top heavy sans letters (with different Rs) …
28-May-2020:
OK, so now it’s a breach of the rules on impartiality to say that somebody “broke the rules” when he very obviously broke the rules. Should the duty to be …
27-May-2020:
I forgot to add the cover image for Seven Types of Ambiguity when I posted my entry for day 3 of the art 🎨challenge. So, I deleted that post and immediately …
27-May-2020:
I love the old Pelican paperback covers, and William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity is particularly well done. This is one of just 2 instances this week …
26-May-2020:
Day 2 of the final week of the May MB challenge (art 🎨). I’m posting examples of book cover art that have impressed me. I’m not necessarily recommending the …
25-May-2020:
I’m sorry to say that I’ve never been in the least competent in the visual arts. So, for the final week of the May challenge, I’m just going to post examples of …
24-May-2020:
My final (day 7) book recommendation is Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White. It was almost a toss-up between this and the same author’s Armadale. Both have …
24-May-2020:
A list of some of my posts on Medium that I think are worth keeping and don’t fall into the broader categories of fiction, aphantasia or critical book …
23-May-2020:
My first thought was to dispose of the body. Then I’d tell the authorities that Frank left me for another woman.
But Tanya (not her real name) knows that her …
23-May-2020:
I said I’ve been adding description tags to some old posts, both on artkavanagh.ie and on Medium. This included several posts about aphantasia, so it made sense …
23-May-2020:
Louise Doughty on the moment when “a slowly swirling mass of ideas”, accumulated search and unconnected scenes coalesced into the kernel of Apple Tree Yard 📖
22-May-2020:
Why are liberals more afraid of the coronavirus than conservatives?, asks Vox’s Ezra Klein. I’m not necessarily more afraid of the virus than of conservatives …
22-May-2020:
My recommendation for day 5 of the book challenge is The Burden of Proof, the second of Scott Turow’s legal thrillers. This one doesn’t have the vertiginously …
22-May-2020:
“The Great Elmore Leonard Renaissance of the Late 90s” by Zach Vasquez on Crime Reads. I love Get Shorty 🍿and Jackie Brown 🎬 but I’ve never seen Out of Sight or …
21-May-2020:
I watched the 4th episode of Stumptown last night. After a promising pilot, this series has been consistently awful. A neat premise and an appealing protagonist …
21-May-2020:
Social distancing in Ridley Road market is one thing I never expected to see. I can remember times when the throng of bodies was virtually impassable. (Suddenly …
21-May-2020:
Now that I’ve got a Mac again, I’m not likely to be doing much browsing on Windows, so I’m switching my default browser from Firefox back to Edge. Firefox is …
21-May-2020:
Book recommendation day 4: Peter Abrahams, Nerve Damage: a dying sculptor gets a sneak peek at his NYT obituary and learns that he might not have been told the …
21-May-2020:
Serendipitously, Catherine Ryan Howard’s Distress Signals, which I recommended on Monday, seems to be Apple Books’ free book of the week, at least in their …
20-May-2020:
Books day 3: Unravelling Oliver was Liz Nugent’s first crime novel and it’s the best (and shortest) of the three I’ve read. A writer of beloved children’s books …
19-May-2020:
It’s so nice to have a Mac again. Looking at the file modification dates on iCloud, I see that it’s a full 18 months since I got rid of the previous one, a 2013 …
19-May-2020:
My 2nd book recommendation is Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. I’ve read it several times but the most recent was nearly 30 years ago. An extraordinary …
19-May-2020:
I just got a 2019 MacBook Air with 🦋 keyboard. At @Munish’s suggestion, I tried the Apple site for a refurb and found one: presumably old surplus stock. (1) The …
18-May-2020:
My first book recommendation in the May challenge is Catherine Ryan Howard’s Distress Signals. A year apart, two women disappear from a cruise ship in the Med …
18-May-2020:
The [Office of Public Works] is prioritising those who merely drive through the park over those who use it, and over the wildlife that has been flourishing …
17-May-2020:
I just noticed that I’ve been writing less than usual since February, when I got my iPad Air, and decided to make it my main writing device. I do hope those …
17-May-2020:
Melville House Press’s ebook sale has some interesting titles this week. I tend to resist buying ebooks, unfortunately. In the eight weeks that MHP has been …
16-May-2020:
The code is too complicated, the design is too simple. You will not be able to learn anything from studying it.
A very minimalist WordPress theme from the …
16-May-2020:
No one wants to operate in a place that people are just passing through; everyone wants to settle where people will stop, and rest, and look around, and talk, …
15-May-2020:
I’ve just gone back and added “Description” meta tags to some of the posts on my site. It doesn’t push them any higher up the search results but it makes them …
15-May-2020:
Spending nearly three months raising a baby she has given birth to, but who[m] she is not biologically related to and will be giving back to his parents …
15-May-2020:
dedicated readers have started buying direct from our websites and those of bookstores that have managed to keep trading online.
Something to consider. Sam …
15-May-2020:
If you’re reading a Medium story in a “desktop” browser and you select some text, you can highlight the selection. I just discovered that I don’t know how to …
14-May-2020:
I don’t think I’m going to be using the new iA Writer feature, welcome though it is. It opens the draft in the web MB interface. I’m happier drafting my …
14-May-2020:
There’s been a lot about iA Writer on MB in the last day or so for obvious reasons. Coincidentally, I’d been looking at it again after a gap of some months …
13-May-2020:
Here’s At the Clinic, a short story by Sally Rooney, featuring the main characters from Normal People, published in The White Review 2016 and now free to read.
13-May-2020:
I should have realized that my book 📚 reviews on Amazon would survive the deletion of my account. The only two for which I have permalinks were posted in 2004 …
13-May-2020:
Scott Turow’s favourite among his own characters is Alejandro “Sandy” Stern. I particularly like a much more peripheral character: Stan Sennett, Sandy’s …
11-May-2020:
It’s time to move my crime novel, A Falling Body, from Medium to artkavanagh.ie. For posting on Medium I split each of the 8 chapters (average 9,000 words) into …
08-May-2020:
Although the piano-bass duo is easily my favourite musical lineup, I had ignored the 2012 album, Togetherness by siblings Monica Dominique and Palle Danielsson, …
08-May-2020:
The man who operated the wind machine, an old aeroplane propeller, was decapitated by it one morning outside Moscow. We watched his head fly across the sky and …
08-May-2020:
The CD I ordered on 22 March finally arrived yesterday (I’d chosen the slowest USPS option, which added 75% to the cost of the CD). So I ripped it using iTunes …
07-May-2020:
Just had the notion that I’d like to buy a 2018 or 2019 MacBook Air (i.e before the Magic Keyboard but with retina display). But they’re ridiculously expensive …
06-May-2020:
Strange there’s so little information online about Intromotion, the 1997 album by Esbjörn Svensson Trio and Krister Anderssen, that I’d never heard of till two …
06-May-2020:
I’m fed up with iCloud Drive overwriting something I’ve just written on Windows with an earlier version of the same file from iPad. I thought I could avoid this …
06-May-2020:
I’ve felt since season 2 that The Good Fight is heading towards a scenario in which Diane votes for Trump in November 2020 and Julius Cain, now a Trump judicial …
06-May-2020:
We need to figure out a less optimized version of working from home …
says M G Siegler (sorry, paywall).
05-May-2020:
I’m no fan of Elon Musk’s but I can’t help bristling at the suggestion that input forms and database software should dictate what’s acceptable as a child’s …
04-May-2020:
People with aphantasia are more likely to work in a STEM field according to a study led by Adam Zeman of the University of Exeter. This has interesting …
04-May-2020:
I just discovered (on Deezer) an Esbjörn Svensson Trio album that I’d never heard of before. It’s Intromotion from 1997 and it also features Krister Andersson …
04-May-2020:
A few weeks ago I bought Textastic for iPad, thinking I needed a full-featured text editor. I’ve just gone back to the free Pretext. I like the font, the short …
03-May-2020:
I used the phrase “immersed in doings” in an attempt at a poem. I couldn’t remember where I had encountered it, so I Googled it and that led me to Alice Koller, …
03-May-2020:
Nothing new here, just a reminder; but if you’re in the mood for reading some general/crime (mostly short) fiction, you’ll find mine here, free to read ✏️
03-May-2020:
Pick TV’s rerun of Elementary has now reached the end of season 6. I’ll probably hang on for season 7, though there was plenty to dislike about it. Season 7 …
03-May-2020:
According to John Naughton in The Observer, the GDPR is
a powerful but essentially unenforced regulation, which makes a mockery of the rule of law.
The Irish …
01-May-2020:
I’ve been cycling as an adult for 37 years. Today I finally discovered how to remove the pump connection from a Presta valve without banging my fingers hard …
28-Apr-2020:
But what is only now coming into focus is the impact that Trump’s unprecedented number of judicial appointments is having on the courts … and on the day-to-day …
27-Apr-2020:
The Wonder Spot, Melissa Bank’s 2005 follow-up to her big hit, is the book that Hadley Freeman wishes more people would read. Indeed, she wishes that more …
26-Apr-2020:
Michael Tamblyn, Kobo CEO, says the publisher is
… rejecting over 50% of the ebooks submitted dealing with #COVID19 and #Coronavirus. They are filled with …
26-Apr-2020:
I caught most of Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys on tv last night. It’s weird to think that it’s 25 years old: a period piece, really. And I remembered so little. …
25-Apr-2020:
A short story by Anna Breslin, The Other Michael Jones. Emma has barely had time to begin to adjust to grief and bereavement when widowhood is abruptly snatched …
25-Apr-2020:
I just Googled how to stop animated gifs from playing automatically in Firefox, and followed the instructions. It’s too soon to say for sure but I may have …
25-Apr-2020:
I just heard yesterday that Deirdre Bair, biographer of Beckett and de Beauvoir, has died. I’ve heard John Calder, then publisher of Beckett’s prose, being …
25-Apr-2020:
Laughter in Dark Times: Some funny (in both senses) book recommendations by Geoff Dyer, including Eve Babitz, Terry Castle and James Jones’s The Thin Red Line, …
22-Apr-2020:
When I’m listening to music, I don’t usually play two albums in a row by the same artist. But, since discovering those 4 recent albums by Enrico Pieranunzi, …
22-Apr-2020:
The euro seems to have fallen below the dollar in value, at least for small amounts, like the monthly Medium subscription ($5). I don’t know whether that’s …
22-Apr-2020:
I just renewed my subscription to Medium (probably only for a month or two) after letting it lapse in June 2019. A lot more posts are behind the paywall now, …
21-Apr-2020:
Bookmarking this to watch Shakespeare’s Globe performances of The Two Noble Kinsmen and The Winter’s Tale in May. And maybe The Merry Wives of Windsor. Or maybe …
21-Apr-2020:
I was debating on WhatsApp as to how to refer to our current circumstances. “Lockdown” isn’t right because we can exercise and buy food, and “quarantine” is …
21-Apr-2020:
I’ve never owned an iPhone, though I’ve had a succession of iPads and iPod Touches. The new SE tempts me, despite the overlap of functions with what I already …
21-Apr-2020:
Procrastination is the brain’s way of getting essential things done (such as house-cleaning) by tricking us into believing that other things (e.g. novels, major …
20-Apr-2020:
Given that I have an invisible disability and that people tend to assume I’m straight by looking at me, the burden is on me to actively correct those …
20-Apr-2020:
I just knocked over the Aeropress, which contained just enough water and ground coffee to make the equivalent of one double espresso. You’d be surprised at how …
20-Apr-2020:
Pianist George Colligan has a new trio album, Live in Arklow just out. Unless he’s played in Arklow more than once, I was annoyed to have to miss the …
20-Apr-2020:
I just posted this on LinkedIn: From tech to text: What comes after Word and VBA?.
Two weeks ago, I was asked to do something I hadn’t done for 10 years: to …
20-Apr-2020:
Several emergency planners and scientists said that the plans to protect the UK in a pandemic had once been a priority and had been well funded for the decade …
20-Apr-2020:
We Live in the Blue Ruin, a short story by Felicia C Sullivan that I enthused about in my (now defunct) “Short fiction on Medium” newsletter nearly 3 years ago, …
19-Apr-2020:
I’m not sure what happened. I must have inadvertantly made the gesture that means “select the entire text and then paste”. Whatever. The gesture that I thought …
19-Apr-2020:
Actually, “disaster” is an exaggeration. But it’s a very annoying setback.
19-Apr-2020:
I decided that Pretext wasn’t going to cut it, so I bought Textastic from the App Store, and somehow overwrote the entire text (10,500 words), with the contents …
19-Apr-2020:
Instead of editing the file on the iCloud drive in Windows, I should copy/move it onto my C: drive, edit it there and save it. Then, when I’m sure there isn’t …
19-Apr-2020:
I use iCloud to swap text docs between Windows and iPad. I keep forgetting to close the file in Pretext on iPad. I then make changes in Windows, go back to …
19-Apr-2020:
And if the arks turn out to be real, don’t get on the one that’s leaving first.
Frank McNally in The Irish Times points out the connection between Douglas …
18-Apr-2020:
I’ve been ruminating again as to why people sometimes call basic, nonframework JavaScript “vanilla”; and it struck me that, as an aphantasic, I often don’t know …
18-Apr-2020:
Piano Sketches is an album of six solo piano tracks performed by six Polish pianists, with a jazz sensibility …
Can’t wait to hear it. Michał Tokaj is the only …
16-Apr-2020:
The Irish Times has reprinted from the Dublin Review of Books a long essay by Maureen O’Connor in which O’Connor fiercely attacks a profile of Edna O’Brien by …
16-Apr-2020:
In my earlier post, since corrected, I wrongly described Mary-Kay Wilmers as “founding editor” or the LRB (London Review of Books). She was cofounder and has …
16-Apr-2020:
The Guardian has ranked all of Stephen Frears’ films. (Coincidentally, he’s the ex-husband of Mary-Kay Wilmers, whom I mentioned earlier.) There are plenty I …
16-Apr-2020:
Many of Ireland’s bookshops are back online, according to this Irish Times book club email. And I think most will mail books internationally (hard to test as …
16-Apr-2020:
Because the trackpad on my Windows notebook is so awful, I’ve developed the habit of hitting PgDn instead of trying to scroll. But I keep forgetting that in the …
16-Apr-2020:
There are three Belgian writers whose names are known outside Belgium. None of them wrote about their own country. Simenon went to France, Hergé to Tintin-land …
16-Apr-2020:
It was good to see Bernie Sanders endorse Joe Biden’s candidacy on Monday. That shows the Democrats have grasped the most obvious, elemental political truth – …
16-Apr-2020:
Lee Konitz, one of the greats, has died at the age of 92 🎶
15-Apr-2020:
Paolo @amoroso on the unavoidablity of WhatsApp and the unbeatable quality of its network effect. Just hold your nose and pretend to forget that Facebook owns …
15-Apr-2020:
Speaking of Electric Literature, that’s another site I’m thinking about removing from my feed reader, not because it’s a firehose (as LitHub is) but because …
15-Apr-2020:
Here’s an English translation of a short story, The Island at Noon, by Julio Cortázar (who also wrote the story on which Antonioni’s iconic 60s film Blow-Up was …
15-Apr-2020:
I’m fed up of headlines and stories saying that the economy/life/society isn’t going to return to normal. Obviously not. When has anything ever “returned to …
14-Apr-2020:
… the force of the take-off made him “float” off his seat, causing him to stand up and involuntarily grab the ejection handle to steady himself.
Man …
14-Apr-2020:
Speaking of Tyler Cowen, I just found this Slate piece from 2006, in which he declines to lament the then-imminent disappearance of the independent bookstore. …
14-Apr-2020:
I’m probably about to remove Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution from my feed reader, perhaps temporarily. Covid-19 has dominated recent posts, and they’re mainly …
14-Apr-2020:
I was one of those people who held out the hope that the iPad would be something wholly different from a laptop … I’m sitting here using an iPad with a physical …
12-Apr-2020:
I’m feeling a bit proud of myself. I wrote a 350-word response — the first draft was longer — to this piece in The Irish Times, written from a runner’s …
12-Apr-2020:
New post from me: Heather Sellers: Learning the lessons of face-blindness and place-blindness. A professor of creative writing gets lost in very familiar …
11-Apr-2020:
After all, people still hesitate to insert cell phones into their fiction—in large part, I’ve always believed, because the classics they grew up reading … don’t …
11-Apr-2020:
Of the several recent Enrico Pieranunzi albums I mentioned a few days ago, the trio album with Ulysses Owens, Jr is a must-have, but I also can’t pass up the …
11-Apr-2020:
As I’ve already repeated ad nauseam, I much prefer printed books to ebooks. I haven’t been buying any of the former recently, though I get daily email reminders …
11-Apr-2020:
Standing in the slow-moving queue outside the supermarket, I couldn’t help getting anxious that most of what I wanted would be sold out. I had to remind myself …
11-Apr-2020:
If you enjoy piano-bass-drums trios, Serbian ensemble Majamisty TriO have made Organic, their new album, available for download for €1 or more. I haven’t …
11-Apr-2020:
Week 4 of Melville House Press’s ebook sale sees a new batch of books reduced to $1.99 for the next 7 days. There are 2 or 3 here that appeal to me 📚
10-Apr-2020:
For years, on a succession of Macs, I kept my iTunes library on an external hard disk. Now, I no longer have a Mac. Most of my music is still on the external …
10-Apr-2020:
And, speaking of Thomas Fonnesbaek, I also learned that he made a trio recording, Groovements, with Aaron Parks. I’d been saying for years that some label …
10-Apr-2020:
Enrico Pieranunzi is nothing if not prolific. Yesterday, I learned of a slew of recent albums I hadn’t known about (because not on his regular CamJazz label), …
09-Apr-2020:
LitHub’s Emily Temple has a list of the best 50 contemporary (with us, that is) long novels. I’m puzzled that she thinks The Likeness doesn’t run to 500 pages: …
09-Apr-2020:
On Electric Literature, Jess Zimmerman asks Why is everyone suddenly obsessed with sourdough?
07-Apr-2020:
It really does remind me of a dysfunctional family with a psychotic, alcoholic dad, where where everybody’s trying to cover for dad.
I’ve been thinking about …
06-Apr-2020:
The ruthless economic underpinnings of the internet serve to punish the giver and destroy the spiritual, disinterested essence of the gift.
Welcome to the …
06-Apr-2020:
I’m wondering if I’m going to abandon Trigonometry with just 3 of its 8 episodes left to air. Probably not, but it’s slow moving and painful to watch (not in a …
06-Apr-2020:
From The Guardian: Steven Appleby, Why I felt liberated when I started dressing as a woman.
06-Apr-2020:
A short story, Sana and her portrait by Nardine. I haven’t been posting “Short fiction on Medium” for ages, partly because much of it is behind the paywall and …
05-Apr-2020:
I’ve just watched a video from Hampstead Theatre of their 2016 production of Wild by Mike Bartlett, based on Edward Snowden. It’s free to watch till 10 pm …
05-Apr-2020:
Here’s an encouraging post from Alex Tabarrok, who points out that the aim of “lockdown” isn’t simply to flatten the curve (to give health services a better …
05-Apr-2020:
Putin’s Troll Machine is churning out endless fake news about the dangers of 5G in English, while trumpeting the benefits for a domestic audience in Russia. …
05-Apr-2020:
Here’s a brief clip (YouTube) in which Alan Kendle interviews Adam Zeman about dreaming and aphantasia.
04-Apr-2020:
“We hit 3M hard today” tweeted Trump, as if 3M were a foreign terrorist camp.
I remember (as if it were just a few weeks ago) a world in which the news that …
04-Apr-2020:
In the war between dog-walkers and cyclists, I’m generally on the side of the latter — I am one, after all. But not when I’m walking my sister’s dog, which is …
04-Apr-2020:
McConnell has been privately asking Republican-appointed judges to retire soon so Trump can appoint their replacements …
The utterly shameless Senate majority …
04-Apr-2020:
Brett Nordquist has been making coffee at home a lot more, and describes his method, involving a Chemex and a gooseneck kettle. Just one quibble: I hate it when …
04-Apr-2020:
Appearing to be somewhat emotional in Buswells Hotel, he talked about being humbled by the evident support of his colleagues.
Alan Kelly, the new leader of the …
03-Apr-2020:
Prolific, versatile novelist Toby Litt, who teaches creative writing at Birkbeck College, University of London, has a free online course about Starting to …
03-Apr-2020:
I was wondering why Pinterest keeps recommending my own pins to me. It looks as if it might be because it sees them as coming “from Medium” rather than from me, …
03-Apr-2020:
The Bimhuis, a favourite European jazz club in Amsterdam, has been offering audio from gigs for years. More recently, they’ve moved into very classy video.
So …
03-Apr-2020:
Ellis Marsalis has died, sadly 🎶 🎹
03-Apr-2020:
From Superhighway 98, How Google Ruined the Internet. Not the whole story, but an essential part of it. Hat-tip to Charles Arthur at Theo V. Erspill.
03-Apr-2020:
New Orleans, with Hurricane Katrina, and Port-au-Prince, with the 2010 earthquake; both events only looked like natural disasters. In fact, they amounted to the …
03-Apr-2020:
A picture of somewhere I’ve been.
02-Apr-2020:
I’m Ian Duncan from Community (which I’ve never seen), it says here 📺
02-Apr-2020:
I know of people for whom the lockdown’s big epiphany has been how much their lives were already confined to the immediate locality. And a 2km radius is …
02-Apr-2020:
Medium isn’t down after all. It must have been just a momentary glitch. Sorry.
02-Apr-2020:
The Guardian has a piece by fantasy novelist Mark Lawrence about being an author with aphantasia. Nothing really new here but it’s worth reminding ourselves …
02-Apr-2020:
Medium seems to be down.
02-Apr-2020:
Today I learned that the play Everybody Comes to Rick’s was originally set in Vienna, not Casablanca. I can’t believe that fact had previously escaped me 🍿
02-Apr-2020:
we have to agree with the Authors Guild that “using a global crisis to advance a copyright ideology that violates current federal law and hurts most authors” is …
01-Apr-2020:
I’ve been watching reruns of Elementary on Pick 📺, but they’re skipping episodes. They skipped the whole of season 4, and two of the final three episodes of …
01-Apr-2020:
Till I read this piece in Slate, I’d never heard of That Girl, which ran from 1966 to 1971, though I remember watching both Donna Reed’s and Doris Days’ shows …
01-Apr-2020:
I got an iPad Air two months ago, having previously had a regular iPad. The Air has a 10.5" screen, squeezed into the same external dimensions as the …
31-Mar-2020:
Here’s the first full trailer for the tv adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People. I’m not sure whether I’m going to watch it, though I’m definitely going to …
31-Mar-2020:
From Six Colors by way of Daring Fireball, a useful tip on how to bring up the emoji keyboard when you have a hardware keyboard attached to your iPad/iOS …
31-Mar-2020:
Fred Kaplan argues that, now that Orbán has been given power to rule by decree indefinitely, Hungary should be expelled from EU and NATO. I can’t see any …
31-Mar-2020:
I try to follow a link from Outlook and get an alert that my organization’s policies don’t allow that. (This is nonsense, everyone else in the company can do …
30-Mar-2020:
Another reason why I think that when we eventually emerge from this crisis it will be into a postcapitalist economy.
30-Mar-2020:
Good ideas in a crisis are good ideas outside of crisis, and bad ideas reveal themselves …
This, from Una Mullally in The Irish Times, is kind of what I had in …
30-Mar-2020:
25 of The Guardian’s favourite long reads. And there I was, just saying that I dislike recommendations.
30-Mar-2020:
The magazine was notorious for publishing “second-tier fiction by first-rate writers.” If John Updike couldn’t sell a short story to The New Yorker, he could …
29-Mar-2020:
I’ve been seeing many book recommendations this last 2 weeks, and it’s made me realize that not only do I hate algorithmic recommendations but I’ve never much …
28-Mar-2020:
A week ago, I said that I was not posting, but writing. Now, here are 1,200 words about nothing of any consequence: Music distribution formats. I ordered a CD …
28-Mar-2020:
I greatly enjoyed this LitHub piece by Suzanne Rivecca about her reluctance to accept a perfect-seeming job with a book festival while hating the job she …
28-Mar-2020:
Liz Nugent is one of the most original crime novelists to have emerged in Ireland in recent years. Her characters are dangerous and damaged but fasinating. …
28-Mar-2020:
Last night, the Irish government announced new restrictions on movement and activities. Here’s a list of the kinds of business that are allowed to stay open.
28-Mar-2020:
ICYMI, the Warren for President Tech Team has open-sourced some of the tools they developed for the campaign. I wish they were still using them.
27-Mar-2020:
Following my free trial of Apple Music, I bought a couple of albums but to spread my wishlist purchases over a longer period I also signed up for Deezer 3-month …
27-Mar-2020:
Contrary to his own expectations, Sameer Vasta is finding it hard to write. I’d like to tell him that it’s early days, that these very unfamiliar circumstances …
27-Mar-2020:
They don’t know what they don’t know.
Yup, it’s those pesky unknown unknowns again, coming back to bite us harder than ever, in an epidemic of armchair …
27-Mar-2020:
Art Pepper, Thelonious Monk,
Charlie Parker and all that junk
All of that junk and all of that jazz
Play something for the Birdman of Alcatraz.
Richard …
27-Mar-2020:
I expect that the global economy we’ll find ourselves in after the present crisis will be in some sense a postcapitalist one. I’m not going to try to predict …
26-Mar-2020:
I went food shopping this morning. Traffic was sparse so it made sense to cross the road in one of the frequent gaps rather than press the button for the …
25-Mar-2020:
this is how an artist should live — oblivious to the possibility of their own importance; ever ploughing silently on ahead with the next impractical, …
24-Mar-2020:
William Davies thinks that the 2008 crash did not result in a fundamental shift in capitalism. I don’t agree. The plutocracy lost interest in (and hope of) …
24-Mar-2020:
Diverted Traffic is a new LRB newsletter, featuring a different piece from the archive each day – chosen for its compulsive, immersive and escapist qualities … …
24-Mar-2020:
Tim Allhoff’s 2014 trio album, There Will Be Light, concludes with a version of Hollow Talk, the song used in the original Danish/Swedish series, The Bridge. I …
24-Mar-2020:
It seems that M G Siegler, whose posts on Medium have hitherto been freely accessible, may have moved behind the paywall. I’ve been considering resuming my …
23-Mar-2020:
Though I started to work from home in 2005, I’ve only just come to realize (reading what others have posted on the subject) that I’m not very good at it. Too …
22-Mar-2020:
As an aphantasic, I’m bad at planning, prioritizing etc. In previous crises, from 1974 to 2008, I’d feel obliged to try to work out where things were going, …
22-Mar-2020:
My month’s free trial of Apple Music is coming to an end and the list of albums I’ll likely buy afterwards is growing. Current favourite is Trilogy 2. Amazed at …
22-Mar-2020:
Matt Stoller warns that huge corporations (like Boeing) may be about to exploit this crisis to extract a bailout — with the complicity of Dems as well as …
22-Mar-2020:
For the next week our top ten bestselling fiction ebooks are just $1.99. (Ebooks only, folks.) From classics like Every Man Dies Alone to newer favorites like …
21-Mar-2020:
Not posting, but writing
I haven’t been posting much recently but I have been writing. I recently wrote 4,000 words on the difference between gender identity and gender-as-behaviour, …
21-Mar-2020:
Of my Medium posts about aphantasia, “Aphantasia can look a bit like ADHD” has the second-highest number of page views. It’s frustrating because the follow-up, …
21-Mar-2020:
I couldn’t resist making one of those 4-square grids out of this quotation from Gianrico Carofiglio’s Temporary Perfections 📚
20-Mar-2020:
In the late 00s, I got interested in a number of German jazz pianists, several of whom had been taught by John Taylor in Cologne; chief among them are Jürgen …
20-Mar-2020:
An exasperated Public Health Service put out a news release recommending that older people with chronic diseases like heart trouble should be among the first …
19-Mar-2020:
I’m not sure whether this is a tautology or the next step in my education: I was under the impression that passata was tomato by definition 🍅
19-Mar-2020:
I’ve managed to go all this time without reading any fiction by Anne Enright. Pale Hands I Loved, Beside the Shalimar is a short story from 2000 about loving a …
19-Mar-2020:
This excerpt from Nicholas Delbanco’s book Why Writing Matters about the problem with plagiarism starts with some interesting details of actual cases but …
19-Mar-2020:
one of the joys of an excellent cup of coffee is to savor the taste as it cools … the upshot being that the very best coffee really is “good to the last …
18-Mar-2020:
One of the bars was the original bar from the old 108 pub in Rathgar. Complete with working taps, upholstered booths, bar stools and standard-issue pub carpet … …
18-Mar-2020:
Just as well I bought an iPad Air six weeks ago. It makes it easier to resist the temptation to get the new MacBook Air. For now.
18-Mar-2020:
John Banville, when asked to contribute to a collection of 6-word stories, wrote, “Should have lived more, written less”.
Rosemary Jenkinson, A writer’s guide …
17-Mar-2020:
Somehow I failed to notice that Ethan Iverson had left The Bad Plus over two years ago and been replaced by Orrin Evans. Though I’ve heard the trio live twice, …
17-Mar-2020:
Another Apple Music discovery: a solo piano performance of Chico Buarque’s O Que Sera by Tim Allhoff. I already have a solo version by Danilo Rea and live …
17-Mar-2020:
A beginner’s guide to The Ezra Klein Show. The cofounder of Vox introduces the most compelling episodes of his podcast. I’m going to start with Jaron Lanier and …
16-Mar-2020:
Some of the albums I’ll consider buying when my free Apple Music trial ends next week 🎶 🎹:
Angelo Comisso, Sturm und Drang Giovanni Mirabassi trio, Summer’s …
16-Mar-2020:
Cet arrêt brutal pourrait engendrer à terme la fin notre activité ! Nous ne bénéficions d’aucune aide extérieur.
The survival of one of my very favourite …
14-Mar-2020:
I am really fed up of apps (particularly common on iOS) that automatically linkify URLs, so that they open whenever you try to copy them. Because the only thing …
14-Mar-2020:
Good to see an economist finally recognize that the inflation rate isn’t uniform across the whole economy. It never has been, and we’ve often seen monetarist …
14-Mar-2020:
Around 2004, I lived in a house with original Steven Appleby art on the walls. I met him once and had previously followed his series in (unless my memory is …
14-Mar-2020:
“Installments” with two “l”s looks wrong to me but when I write it with just one “l” I get a squiggly line underneath. I think I’ll ignore the squiggle and …
14-Mar-2020:
The only constitutional freedoms ultimately recognized may soon be limited to those useful to wealthy, Republican, White, straight, Christian, and armed males— …
14-Mar-2020:
“Stay indoors unless you have to leave the house out of necessity, i.e. to shop for food, for health reasons or to walk the dog.”
Giulia Blasi on what it’s …
12-Mar-2020:
I’ve never read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History in spite of friends’ recommendations but Emily Temple’s close reading of the prologue on LitHub might be just …
12-Mar-2020:
Another discovery thanks to my Apple Music trial sub, Front Room Songs. I know Florian Ross’s trio work, but this is different: duets between piano and …
12-Mar-2020:
So, Trump has at last done something to counteract the climate crisis, by banning travel — largely air travel, of course — to the US from most of Europe.
12-Mar-2020:
I’m removing Charles Arthur’s The Overspill from my feed reader. I generally don’t follow/subscribe to sites that are updated regularly or frequently. The …
11-Mar-2020:
Paul Krugman reviews Piketty’s Capital and Ideology. I haven’t read any Piketty, but I see his emphasis on inequality as unfortunate. The real problem is the …
10-Mar-2020:
I’m using my month’s free trial of Apple Music to listen to (inter alia) Angelo Comisso’s 2010 album, Sturm und Drang. I got one track, “Nida”, from an All …
10-Mar-2020:
At 62, Amanda Redman is now “the right age” to play Cleopatra, who was 38 at the time of the events shown in Shakespeare’s play. Incidentally, 38 is also the …
09-Mar-2020:
I just exported all my feeds from Reeder 4 and imported them into NetNewsWire for iPad! Thanks, @brentsimmons
09-Mar-2020:
I’m linking to Tyler Cowen’s excerpt from the NYT interview with Anne Enright rather than to the source because I haven’t got a subscription to the NYT 📚
07-Mar-2020:
Paolo @amoroso, formerly of this parish, on why he prefers a chromebook to an Ubuntu box
03-Mar-2020:
I wish I was in Paris tomorrow or Thursday. I’ve seen Pieranunzi in the Sunside twice before and no doubt will again 🎵 🎹
03-Mar-2020:
I’ve been given another month’s free trial of Apple Music. (I don’t normally use a music subscription service.) The search is awful. I just searched for “Flim …
03-Mar-2020:
I love this headline: JavaScript Best Practices — Things to Avoid. I haven’t read the piece (because paywall) but I generally find that in most fields of …
03-Mar-2020:
I can’t quite believe that my Medium post about tropes and subgenres in the first three Cormoran Strike novels is very nearly 2 years old. I’ve since written …
03-Mar-2020:
From 2016, a reminder from playwright David Hare of Georges Simenon’s significance. Hare had adapted Simenon’s little known novel «La Main» for the stage as The …
02-Mar-2020:
The Insomnia app didn’t delete my points after all. It logged me out unexpectedly and without warning. I don‘t know why.
02-Mar-2020:
The Insomnia (Irish coffee shop chain) app seems to have punished me for refusing to share my location by deleting my accumulated points towards a free coffee. …
01-Mar-2020:
Everything good in the world is kindness.
Jan Morris is 93 now and has published what may be her last book. (Mind you, she said 2001’s Trieste and the Meaning …
29-Feb-2020:
I really like the iPadOS app Pretext, in which I’ve been doing nearly all of my writing recently. It’s got HTML syntax highlighting but unfortunately recognizes …
28-Feb-2020:
There are tons and tons and tons of things that are effectively “hidden” on any OS.
Charles Arthur on Matt Birchler on “discoverability”. I’ve often complained …
27-Feb-2020:
The last time I needed to convert a colour PDF page to greyscale, I simply used Preview on the Mac. Unfortunately, I don’t have a Mac at the moment and it’s not …
25-Feb-2020:
Easons has bought Dubray Books. I first misread the headline as Easons acquired by Dubray and my pulse quickened. Alas …
25-Feb-2020:
I don’t know what The Temple House Vanishing is about. But on the strength of Rachel Donohue’s evocation of 1990s Dublin (which I missed, having moved to London …
22-Feb-2020:
When a short story writer goes long: Brandon Taylor: reluctant novelist 📚
22-Feb-2020:
One particularly annoying thing about iPadOS system ads: they interfere with the use of Cmd-Tab to switch out of the Settings app after I’ve turned Bluetooth …
21-Feb-2020:
My dozen or so posts on Medium about aphantasia tend to get more views than my other posts on that platform. They don’t all do equally well, however. Two that I …
20-Feb-2020:
Just go into a good art museum, and look at what they are stocking in their bookstore.
Tyler Cowen lists the many reasons to read art books 📚
19-Feb-2020:
The Dublin Inquirer intends to spin off its cycle collision tracker as a citizen-run project, and would like to hear from Dublin-based people with relevant …
18-Feb-2020:
The boom is back for some people.
It always was. Dispatches from an extra on Normal People 📺
18-Feb-2020:
I’ve been reading Lucy Caldwell’s Being Various, an anthology of new Irish short stories by authors who have emerged since 1998. So far, I’ve particularly liked …
16-Feb-2020:
Craig Fehrman, How Obama’s Reading Shaped His Writing. A nice book excerpt on LitHub about the former president as both reader and writer 📚
16-Feb-2020:
Until yesterday, I was unaware that Harold Wilson had sued the members of the The Move for libel in 1967. I later became interested in both Wilson (surprise …
16-Feb-2020:
I’ve just posted In defence of flow. It was prompted by Barbara Gail Montero’s essay Against Flow, which I think I discovered via a Micro.blog post, though I …
15-Feb-2020:
“[The burglars] got distracted by the booze and were here when the police arrived … It puts me in mind of a Joe Orton play.”
Inept burglars barely manage to …
13-Feb-2020:
Lyle Mays has died 🎶 🎹
11-Feb-2020:
The most recently modified file in the Documents folder on my Windows notebook is named Working Copy of Working Copy of Untitled 1.txt ¯\(ツ)/¯
11-Feb-2020:
I complained that Sinn Féin rather than the left had gained from the collapse of Irish “civil war politics”. It’s not all bad news: the Social Democrats now …
11-Feb-2020:
“I’m not going to argue for the wider distribution of Nazi material, but I still don’t trust Amazon to be the arbiters of free speech …”
The problem is not …
10-Feb-2020:
I just discovered that Slide Over and Split View work in portrait mode. Is this new (maybe in iPadOS)? I really had no idea. This could be a game changer for …
10-Feb-2020:
Oh, it looks as if the Oscars were on. Between the Irish general election, storm Ciara, the coronavirus and my nephew’s birthday I somehow didn’t notice.
09-Feb-2020:
I’m continuing to move my fiction from Medium to artkavanagh.ie and my six-part novella, Dear Old Stockholm is the latest to go. The full list is here.
09-Feb-2020:
A subscriber-only piece in The Irish Times suggests that Irish “civil war politics” may finally be coming to an end 100 years later. I just wish that the left, …
08-Feb-2020:
In iOS 12 (on iPad), I used to use Federico @viticci’s Rename files shortcut to change the filename extension (eg from .txt to .html and vice versa). Having …
07-Feb-2020:
I just signed up for the year’s free trial of Apple tv+. I’m kind of surprised that I’m eligible for it in Ireland. And I’ve no idea what to watch.
07-Feb-2020:
I haven’t been able to find a print copy of Lisa Lutz‘s The Swallows yet so I downloaded the sample chapter from Apple Books 📖 and I’m hooked. Here’s the …
06-Feb-2020:
Facing a structurally similar situation in 1998 and 1999, Clinton secured not only acquittal but a clear political triumph over his adversaries — emerging from …
05-Feb-2020:
I keep forgetting about RTE’s Brainstorm site because it doesn’t have an RSS feed that I can find. But that’s OK: I don’t want to follow it slavishly, …
05-Feb-2020:
The caucus disaster was caused by our abandonment of expertise.
… says Mike Elgan, plausibly enough
05-Feb-2020:
I‘m uing an iPad again after 5 months. I got a 10.5" iPad Air, which seems to have about the same external dimensions as the 9.7" iPad, but with …
05-Feb-2020:
I lived in Hackney (Clapton) from 1988 to 1995, then in nearby South Tottenham till 2003 and back to Clapton for another 2 years. These photos are from a …
04-Feb-2020:
People occasionally come up to me and say: “You’re the reason I became a lawyer.” I have to say: “Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”
Amy Jenkins has a lot to answer for …
03-Feb-2020:
Though I watched the first season of Ashes to Ashes, I’d never seen Life on Mars, till I caught an episode at the weekend. It featured this song, whose …
02-Feb-2020:
Marco Rubio puts his statement on Trump’s impeachment trial behind Medium’s paywall, presumably to make sure it isn’t read by a large number of people. Very …
02-Feb-2020:
Most (perhaps all) of my formerly favourite coffee shops have thrown out their panino toaster grills and instead “toast” their sandwiches in a small oven. This …
02-Feb-2020:
John McPhee’s “Old Man Project”
At 88, he acknowledged that plans for books he had carried around in his head for decades might not now get written, so he had written the stories in one-page …
31-Jan-2020:
Timothy Garton Ash says that former remainers like himself must now work for Brexit to succeed, but not to succeed so well that it encourages other member …
31-Jan-2020:
Each week, Medium emails me view/read figures for my 2 or 3 best performing stories, but I could probably figure these out for myself. It would be more useful …
31-Jan-2020:
I love this review by Laura Miller of Megan Angelo’s Followers. It doesn’t particularly make me want to read the book but the review itself is a well crafted …
30-Jan-2020:
An expanded tenth anniversary edition of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows will be published in a couple of months’ time. Funny, I was recently thinking I ought to …
27-Jan-2020:
Philip Pullman is one of those angered by the omission of an Oxford comma on the Brexit commemorative £0.50 coin. I agree with Associated Press: the comma …
27-Jan-2020:
I just read a whole novella by Cory Doctorow on Ars Technica. Unauthorized Bread is a very effective polemic against the degenerated model of capitalism we’re …
25-Jan-2020:
I’ve moved two more short stories from Medium to my own site: The Asymmetry of Desire and Voluntary Assumption of Risk. The novella, Dear Old Stockholm will be …
25-Jan-2020:
It’s just occurred to me that my two earlier posts of today are probably in breach of Irish law, so I’m deleting them.
23-Jan-2020:
I’m about a quarter of the way through Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard. I’m still not sure whether I actually like it, but I certainly want to know what …
23-Jan-2020:
I complained last week that the mail app on my Windows Phone was no longer working. Yesterday my battery went completely flat so I had to restart the phone and …
22-Jan-2020:
John Oliver puts his foot down on pointless push notifications, it says here. Surely “pointless push notifications” is a redundancy. I have never allowed a …
22-Jan-2020:
I just added up the word counts of all my posts on the topic of aphantasia and got a total of 19,176. While there’s a lot of repetition and plenty that I would …
19-Jan-2020:
I’ve moved two more of my short stories from Medium to artkavanagh.ie — The Bourne Indeterminacy and Protected. “Protected” is long: about 9,500 words spread …
18-Jan-2020:
It looks as if Audible may have caved over audiobook “Captions”. I certainly hope so. The Audible model was ludicrous: a writer writes a book, an actor reads …
18-Jan-2020:
Bird is the Worm recommends a video of Mats Eilertsen playing “Tundra” from his album Reveries and Revelations. I’ve got a couple of albums where Eilertsen …
17-Jan-2020:
Just saw a headline on The Verge, Twitter hashtags aren’t as useful as they used to be, and wondered if this was a story from 5 years ago that had been revived.
16-Jan-2020:
I stopped using Edge because, if I suddenly changed scrolling direction, it would jump a few pages back in the history. New version still unusable: when I …
15-Jan-2020:
Microsoft has just released the new, Chromium-based version of its Edge browser, so I’m trying it out (on Windows 10). It’s available for Mac as well. Remember …
14-Jan-2020:
Really the only misgiving I had about deleting my Amazon account was the fear that I might not be able to find a replacement stainless steel filter for the …
14-Jan-2020:
I just noticed that the Mail app on my Windows phone (a Lumia 535) hasn’t updated for 10 days. This is the end of the road for Windows phones. I can’t …
13-Jan-2020:
I’d read that the philosopher Derek Parfit had been aphantasic (as I am) but I didn’t know the source of this information till I read this New Yorker profile …
12-Jan-2020:
Two weeks ago, I finished reading Tana French’s In the Woods for the third time, and I’ve now written 2,000 words about it. I’m not going to post them, though, …
11-Jan-2020:
Matt Stoller’s What Is the Point of Economics? looks interesting but I was repeatedly distracted by wondering why “semi-automatic” is hyphenated. Apparently …
10-Jan-2020:
John Siracusa’s Front and Center app is interesting but has no appeal for me: I use Command-backtick to cycle between the windows of the current app, so I don’t …
10-Jan-2020:
Richard Williams looks back on 50 years of Manfred Eicher’s record label, ECM. Williams’s choices wouldn’t be mine: my tastes are more mainstream and tend …
08-Jan-2020:
Elizabeth Wurtzel has died. I am flabbergasted to read that it’s 25 years since Prozac Nation came out. There’s some kind of terrifying time-devouring anomaly …
06-Jan-2020:
Alternatively, I could enable the Windows Linux subsystem, install a distro from the Windows Store (I chose debian), run bash and use the wc command on the …
06-Jan-2020:
When Phil Chevron died in 2013, I tweeted that I’d listened to Let’s Talk about the Weather several hundred times around 1980/81 without ever realizing that the …
06-Jan-2020:
Who are the strangers deep inside,
Haunting undaunted, their presence denied?
The Radiators’ Ghostown (produced by Tony Visconti) is 40 years old 🎵
05-Jan-2020:
For the past few months, I’ve been writing on a Windows notebook, using EditPad Lite (and Consolas, a lovely font). Until now, I didn’t know if there was an …
05-Jan-2020:
I watched Atomic Blonde on Channel 4 last night. Mostly stylish (Berlin!) tedium interspersed with sickeningly realistic violence, but it picked up at the end …
04-Jan-2020:
Pinterest continues to amuse and frustrate me. I had “pinned” Anil Dash’s post, ‘Link in bio’ is a slow knife. Someone repinned it to a board named Must Have …
03-Jan-2020:
Who said it: Dominic Cummings or Nathan Barley? I got 2 wrong (nos. 3 and 11). In my defence, it has been at least 15 years since I’ve watched Nathan Barley 😉
02-Jan-2020:
50 years ago, on 2 January 1970, my father died. It was just two days after my mother’s 36th birthday on New Year’s Eve. For years my mother reluctantly and …
01-Jan-2020:
Another list of short stories, this time from Future Tense. While I like Future Tense’s nonfiction, I’ve found the few short stories I’ve read to be more …
01-Jan-2020:
Here is Electric Lit’s list of Recommended Reading’s four most read short stories from each of the last 8 years. I haven’t yet read most of these stories so I’m …
31-Dec-2019:
Booker T (of the MGs and “Green Onions”) has written an autobiography “without the aid of a ghost writer”, as Richard Williams puts it, and it sounds …
31-Dec-2019:
This Irish Times story claims that an Irish architect “helped France rediscover” Charlotte Perriand but I suspect it may be an exaggeration. Anyway, an …
30-Dec-2019:
There is massive distrust of the wealthy in this book, and virtually no distrust of concentrated state power.
Tyler Cowen on Thomas Piketty’s Capital and …
29-Dec-2019:
I thought my iTunes library (on an external disk for years) had spontaneously disappeared, but it turns out the truly atrocious trackpad on this HP Envy x360 …
29-Dec-2019:
I’ve hesitated to move my fiction from Medium to my own site. While fiction tends not to do well on Medium, my stories have had a trickle of views there, partly …
29-Dec-2019:
Ah, I think I understand now. Put a comma between “independent YouTube channels” and “with a slant towards left-leaning or politically neutral channels” and …
29-Dec-2019:
the algorithm is shown to favor mainstream media and cable news content over independent YouTube channels with slant towards left-leaning or politically neutral …
28-Dec-2019:
You know what the secret of prediction is? Timing.
6/ China implodes, the world wobbles. Ah, well, this almost happened … I was a year early and 10 trillion …
27-Dec-2019:
Nick Drake’s “Day Is Done” played over the closing scene of Coronation Street this evening. I don’t really know the original but it put me in the mood to listen …
26-Dec-2019:
I’m undecided between marginal notes and <details> tags for references. Marginal notes are tricky to position and mean the body text can’t be centred on …
26-Dec-2019:
Ken Harris, the narrator of Carson McCullers’s short story, “Who Has Seen the Wind?” is a familiar literary character: his first book …
26-Dec-2019:
I clumsily smashed a couple of wine glasses while reaching for the Aeropress plunger, so left my coffee to drip through the filter while I carefully swept up …
25-Dec-2019:
Is my memory playing tricks on me or does the ending of Three Days of the Condor take place at Christmas? If it does, that will do fine as my “favourite …
25-Dec-2019:
I’m a bit surprised to find Laura Miller describing the audiobook of Kate Atkinson’s Big Sky (which I haven’t read yet) as “the Rolls Royce of cozy listens”. …
24-Dec-2019:
Vox’s Constance Grady recaps the 2010s in book publishing and offers an explanation as to why the expected ebook revolution didn’t exactly happen (except to the …
24-Dec-2019:
A baker’s dozen of suggestions from Tyler Cowen as to what you can do to “stay weird”. No.10 is obvious but indisputable:
Blog rather than tweet. Stay off …
23-Dec-2019:
The good old days of the web may be just around the corner. In part a follow-up to my LinkedIn article from last week about advertising and surveillance …
23-Dec-2019:
I missed the final episode of His Dark Materials on BBC last night. (And, because I’m in Ireland, I can’t access iPlayer.) I don’t feel upset about that. I’m …
22-Dec-2019:
I’m working on turning my long PhD thesis into a much shorter “monograph” on the theme of justice in Andrew Marvell’s work. In the meantime, I’ve posted 3 …
21-Dec-2019:
Zach Vasquez thinks that The Silent Partner would make a better Christmas movie than Die Hard. I’ve seen both films just once, the first about 40 years ago and …
21-Dec-2019:
The hills have eyebrows. (Pic from Getty Images via Buzzfeed 😉)
20-Dec-2019:
After fruitlessly Googling how to hard reset a Walkman A865, I tried Bing and found instructions, but they assume that I can actually get to the home screen. …
20-Dec-2019:
Like @numericcitizen, I came to the end of an experiment this week. In my case, the experiment was not with Micro.blog but with Mix, Garrett Camp’s web …
20-Dec-2019:
I deleted my Facebook account (then only 18 months old) in mid2017, and I only ever dipped a cautious toe into Instagram, but I haven’t been able to break away …
18-Dec-2019:
I asked a friend for his opinion on my Sally Rooney post and he said he finds the fonts and colours inimical to a long read So, I’m looking for suggestions for …
17-Dec-2019:
Before posting an article on LinkedIn 2 days ago, I wanted to read some other examples. LinkedIn doesn’t make it easy to search for articles specifically. I …
17-Dec-2019:
Slate’s Laura Miller on what happened in YA fiction during the 2010s. The genre entered the decade like a lion and now seems to be eating itself alive 📚
16-Dec-2019:
The London Review of Books has relaunched its website and everything — current issue, archive etc — is freely accessible (no paywall) for the next month. An …
15-Dec-2019:
Will Self never wanted to write a memoir …
one that leaves him, Montaigne-like, immured in the tower of wisdom, and writing about it with a mixture of …
15-Dec-2019:
This is a bit of an experiment and possibly one I won’t be repeating very often, but I’ve just posted an article on LinkedIn for the first time: Advertising and …
14-Dec-2019:
It looks as if Mix.com is no longer allowing comments on mixed/shared links. I don’t know if this is permanent, a glitch or a temporary experiment. If it’s …
14-Dec-2019:
Where possible, I like to link to an image on, say, a publisher’s site rather than upload an extra copy. That falls down when the publisher subsequently moves …
12-Dec-2019:
I liked the Dexter books a lot. (I enjoyed a lot of the tv series too, but I thought those responsible made some odd choices.) Here’s an interview with Jeff …
12-Dec-2019:
Has anybody got any idea why some Medium URLs end in a question mark (if it is indeed a question mark)? This one, for example: …
12-Dec-2019:
One thing I like about Medium is that I’ve tended to draft posts in a text editor without formatting, while for my own site I’ve been adding HTML markup as I …
12-Dec-2019:
Gladwell discusses le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, the 1963 novel in which Smiley first appears …
Wrong. Smiley is the main character in Call for …
11-Dec-2019:
Here’s a sobering post from @JoshNicholas about what happens when the inflexibility of code meets the unpredictibility of the world: Code is fragile
10-Dec-2019:
Not relevant to my previous micropost, but the mention of Ewan Morrison reminded me of this Medium piece from April 2018, Why I’m no longer a self-published …
10-Dec-2019:
I couldn’t support the choice because it was a woman written by a man, when there were three women who’d written women on the shortlist …
Ewan Morrison wins …
08-Dec-2019:
I’ve been going through old Medium posts, looking for ones to delete because no longer relevant. Ironically, I’m reluctant to delete this one from nearly 2 …
08-Dec-2019:
When quoting seventeenth-century prose containing lots of italics, I’m often undecided whether to style the italics as emphasis (<em> tags in HTML) or …
07-Dec-2019:
The Corbyn Effect is that bad opinion polls for his party are good news because people are more likely to vote for their local Labour MP if they are convinced …
07-Dec-2019:
I’m working on a longer project at the moment, so there’s nothing new to post. Instead, here’s a reminder of some recent stuff:
Sally Rooney’s short stories …
05-Dec-2019:
Fred Kaplan’s Best Jazz of 2019, including a newly released 1999 live recording from Paul Bley, Gary Peacock and Paul Motian 🎵 🎹
03-Dec-2019:
Robert Reich brands Moscow Mitch “the worst Senate Majority Leader in history”. Hard to argue with that.
02-Dec-2019:
Ahistorical Survey, a poem
I wrote these two short verse paragraphs at the beginning of August. It felt as if they were waiting for a third to round them off so I put them aside and, I’m …
01-Dec-2019:
By me: I was not born to follow. Why I don’t think the “following” model is satisfactory, either for social media or the open web.
30-Nov-2019:
I listen to a lot of piano-bass-drum trios (because there are a lot to listen to), but I really love the piano-bass duo (sans tambour). Just been listening to …
30-Nov-2019:
I make no great claims for my posts about aphantasia. They’re no more than the uninformed conjectures of an inexpert layperson. But I do think they go into the …
29-Nov-2019:
David Berman thinks that the apparently irresolvable debate between monists (Hume) and dualists (Berkeley) results from a basic difference in how we perceive …
27-Nov-2019:
Everyone seems to assume vast quantities of courage in other people that they cannot seem to find in themselves.
Dahlia Lithwick, America’s Descent into Legal …
27-Nov-2019:
Vox’s Constance Grady explains how Tana French solved the problem of writing a series of detective novels in which every case is designed to destroy its …
27-Nov-2019:
I hate the way Word automatically hyperlinkifies web and email addresses. When people edit them subsequently, they nearly always make a total mess of them. I …
26-Nov-2019:
It’s four months since I deleted my Amazon account. Getting by without ordering from the online retailer is at worst a minor inconvenience. Living without …
26-Nov-2019:
John Naughton, Oxford, like the past, is another country. The UK turns itself into a “hostile environment”. Sometimes I find myself missing London, then I read …
25-Nov-2019:
This is strange. I seem to gone overnight from 3,800 followers on Mix to just 18, though when I scroll through the list there are clearly a lot more than 18 …
23-Nov-2019:
Now that I’ve posted the piece on Sally Rooney’s short stories it’s time to get on with my longer-term project: reworking my thesis on the justice theme in …
22-Nov-2019:
Your brain doesn’t contain memories, it is memories, it says here. As somebody with severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM), I hope that isn’t …
22-Nov-2019:
I was complaining recently about the difficulty of finding good quality writing on the web using algorithmic search. On ther other hand, it’s easy to find …
21-Nov-2019:
Alex Tabarrok (Marginal Revolution) on why it’s inefficient, expensive and wasteful to require authors to meet a journal’s formatting requirements before a …
21-Nov-2019:
Unfortunately, my hand-rolled JSON feed didn’t work. While validator.jsonfeed.org said it looks valid, the more sensitive parser on Micro.blog says there’s a …
21-Nov-2019:
After months of procrastination, I’ve finally added a JSON feed to my personal site. I created it manually but it should be easy to maintain: each time I add a …
18-Nov-2019:
I haven’t been posting much on Medium recently. Here’s Andrew Marvell (1621–1678), poet: Three essays, which links to three more substantial posts on my own …
17-Nov-2019:
I’ve been meaning to write this for some time. Here it is at last: “Oh my god, shut up”: Sally Rooney, short story writer, my discussion of three short stories …
17-Nov-2019:
I still use Google search, though privacy and surveillance are important to me. That’s because Gmail has been my main email provider since 2005, when I still …
17-Nov-2019:
It’s now a year since I registered the domain artkavanagh.ie and I’ve just renewed it for another year. It feels as if I’m starting to take this web thing …
16-Nov-2019:
I think I’ll be paying a visit to Brother Hubbard of Capel Street soon. Supreme Court judge’s “very specific” dietary choices ☕
14-Nov-2019:
I replaced the CSS stylesheet for my three Andrew Marvell essays (the most recent of which is Religion and divine justice in the work of Andrew Marvell to …
14-Nov-2019:
Adrian Chiles doesn’t like the app that’s replacing Caffè Nero’s loyalty card. I’ve gone off Caffè Nero myself, but more because they no longer have panino …
13-Nov-2019:
By me: Why Google might just conceivably be the future of search. We need something better than the algorithmic search pioneered by Google. The company that …
12-Nov-2019:
Hardly a straightforward test of a hypothesis, this was more a chronicle of how to repeatedly massage data until it yields the desired result.
The study that …
11-Nov-2019:
Deirdre Bair on her first meeting with Samuel Beckett. I found her biography useful, though John Calder (then publisher of Beckett’s non-dramatic works) whom I …
10-Nov-2019:
I seriously, if briefly and reluctantly, considered giving up coffee to keep my anxiety in check, but fortunately I think I’ve found a better and less drastic …
10-Nov-2019:
Originally posted by me on Google+ 18 months ago, now rescued and revised: How and where to read short stories. Printed collections the size and shape of a …
09-Nov-2019:
Unlike Scandinavian crime fiction, French’s has a lyrical heart, even if that heart has been broken.
Slate’s Laura Miller is very acute in identifying why the …
09-Nov-2019:
Katie Yee on LitHub: Here’s why you should preorder all your books from independent bookstores. Indie booksellers are worth supporting and preserving but tbh …
08-Nov-2019:
Now that I’m eschewing ebooks in favour of the printed kind, I wonder if I should also revert to buying and ripping CDs? Anyway, I just got EST Live in …
07-Nov-2019:
God, I love spoilers. Now I know for sure that I don’t need or want to see the film Last Christmas. Not that I was in much doubt anyway 🎥
07-Nov-2019:
Just finished reading Unravelling Oliver, Liz Nugent’s first novel. It’s melodramatic (everybody’s actions seem to have the worst possible consequences) and at …
05-Nov-2019:
David Heinemeier Hansson balances the MacBook’s flaky keyboard against Windows’s ugly font rendering and doesn’t find a satisfactory solution. I love the …
05-Nov-2019:
Liz Nugent, Unravelling Oliver 📚
I’ve just started to read Liz Nugent’s first novel (having already loved her second and found her third quite compelling). This one is looking promising:
It …
02-Nov-2019:
I’m about two-thirds of the way through the first draft of a discussion of three short stories by Sally Rooney, all of which can be read online. I’m looking …
01-Nov-2019:
And yet, Pinterest does guess what they’re going to like based on their demography, at least in their first moments after sign-up. If it didn’t, some portion of …
31-Oct-2019:
Dahlia Lithwick, Why I Haven’t Gone Back to SCOTUS Since Kavanaugh: Some things are worth not getting over. The normalization of Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
30-Oct-2019:
Winter in Venice is the only original studio album by Esbjörn Svensson Trio that I don’t have, and “The Second Page” is the main reason I might still buy it. …
29-Oct-2019:
I’ve just finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel from 2000, When We Were Orphans. It has a narrator who is deeply unengaging, self-absorbed and ineffectual. …
28-Oct-2019:
It’s a year since I (re)posted Sophie Hannah plans her novels before she starts to write: The supposed plotter-pantser distinction is a false dichotomy. I still …
27-Oct-2019:
Today’s stylus equipped and mouse-capable iPad shows great promise.
But it doesn’t (yet) make it easy for users to discover what it can do, says Jean-Louis …
27-Oct-2019:
I’m rereading a short story on The New Yorker site. Annoyingly, the PgUp and PgDn keys move slightly more than a full screen of text, presumably because of …
26-Oct-2019:
Most of my Micro.blog posts are tweet-like utterances of no more than 280 characters, but now and then I post something a bit longer. I’ve just added a page to …
25-Oct-2019:
This is what I’ve been trying to do my whole life, is to write the “everything book”.
Salman Rushdie in conversation with Mitchell Kaplan 📚 🎙
24-Oct-2019:
I’ve been working on this for some time: Religion and divine justice in the work of Andrew Marvell. The original version was cut from my thesis (which I …
24-Oct-2019:
I’ve updated the book reviews page on my site, so that it now includes just about all the Goodreads reviews that I want to keep. In future I intend to post …
23-Oct-2019:
Medium is tweaking the way its Partner Program allocates money from members’ subscriptions to writers who wish to monetize their posts on the platform. It will …
23-Oct-2019:
My follow-up post to LaTeX as a writing tool compares LaTeX and Microsoft Word — and similar word processors.
06-Oct-2019:
EP Thompson talked about history rescuing the past from the “enormous condescension of posterity”. Condescension towards the past has never been more enormous …
06-Oct-2019:
The book I wish I’d written
I won’t say that I wish I’d written Larkin’s poems because I remain endlessly glad that he did.
Clive James 📚
06-Oct-2019:
Most of what gets described as magic realism isn’t realism at all — and therefore it isn’t magic either but something more like fantasy. Don’t blame magic …
06-Oct-2019:
Then came Oscar, the time of the guns,
And there was no land for a man, no land for a country,
Unless guns sprang up
And spoke their language.
The how of …
05-Oct-2019:
Having argued last week that the book review is slowly dying and that this is not a regrettable change, I then inconsistently updated my book reviews page by …
03-Oct-2019:
Me: The book review is slowly dying and we don’t need to mourn it
22-Sep-2019:
So, I just did a search for “Chick Corea Vigilette” on NPR.org and I got hits for “Chuck Berry”, “Chico, California”, “click”, “chock full”, “core”, “vignette” …
22-Sep-2019:
I aimed to dream up a nonsensical political project as self-harmingly loony as Brexit. I’m not sure I succeeded.
An extract from The Cockroach, a satirical …
22-Sep-2019:
I was prompted to write this by @Ciaran’s posts on a writing system for lawyers: LaTeX as a writing tool. In this post, I’m comparing LaTeX with HTML/Markdown. …
19-Sep-2019:
Mike Elgan has some good reasons Why we shouldn’t let AI write for us. Of course, translation is a kind of writing too, so his arguments apply with equal force …
19-Sep-2019:
I finally got around to reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), the first of his books I’ve read since An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains …
19-Sep-2019:
In horror movies as in life, you’re supposed to direct your attention toward survival. Sex is a distraction. If you close your eyes for a kiss you won’t see the …
18-Sep-2019:
Instead of clicking the button to accept all cookies, I accepted only the “necessary” ones. As I browsed the (film) site, I saw several places where you might …
18-Sep-2019:
The city as an entity really doesn’t want anything to do with writers anymore—we’ve been priced out, as have all creative people except those from backgrounds …
10-Sep-2019:
That’s the second time in two days I’ve steadied this lightweight notebook while plugging in a USB drive by pressing my fingers against the opposite side of the …
08-Sep-2019:
Survivorship bias in writing and publishing. We all want to avoid irrational thought patterns but it may not be a good idea for writers, publishers and literary …
06-Sep-2019:
I was sorting through some books, deciding which I want to keep and which I’m taking to the charity shop, and I was surprised to find that I don’t ever intend …
02-Sep-2019:
Fraud accounts for much less than 1% of actual value transfers in real world payment systems. Actual value transfers account for much less than 1% of the fraud …
01-Sep-2019:
I watched the last three episodes of season 1 of Westworld last night and then slept badly, with irritatingly repetitive dreams. The series was engrossing …
31-Aug-2019:
Nearly 18 months ago I wrote about the first three Cormoran Strike novels. Now, at long last, I’ve added my thoughts about the fourth novel, Lethal White 📚
29-Aug-2019:
Babies develop werewolf syndrome after medical mix-up in Spain. At least they know the hair-loss treatment works.
29-Aug-2019:
Unfortunately the cheetahs are going extinct faster than the ultra-rich, but that could change very suddenly
@dave The ultra-rich are illegally buying cheetahs …
28-Aug-2019:
Microsoft has removed epub support from Edge apparently. I wonder if this is related to the move to Chromium as Edge’s rendering engine? I think it’s …
28-Aug-2019:
I watched the first episode of season 1 of Westworld a few weeks ago. I’ve made several attempts to watch the second but I’ve always fallen asleep 10–15 minutes …
26-Aug-2019:
I’ve started to read Christine Mangan’s Tangerine. Here’s a review I hadn’t read before buying it, from Laura Miller (usually of Slate) in The New Yorker 📖
26-Aug-2019:
I suppose I didn’t really expect to get an answer to this question but it may just be because I didn’t explain myself very well. I’m wondering if “the …
25-Aug-2019:
Here’s a multipurpose, universal rating scheme I devised a few years ago. I believe it should be widely acceptable.
25-Aug-2019:
This award-winning bookshop is in a town about 10 Km from where I’ve been living for the past 3 years and I haven’t visited it yet. The last time I tried to go, …
25-Aug-2019:
My own site isn’t organized as a blog and doesn’t have an RSS/Atom/JSON feed. I’ve considered handrolling one and may still try that. But now that I’ve had to …
25-Aug-2019:
It turns out that I was able to change my username on WordPress.com (but I decided to change the display name instead because the username I wanted was already …
25-Aug-2019:
Tara Sparling, 10 Bloody Brilliant Reasons To Marie Kondo Your Bookshelves. I wanted to comment on this post but WordPress.com made me sign in to an account I …
25-Aug-2019:
“I have started a new book and have doubts about whether it is really a good idea. I try to remind myself that I ALWAYS have doubts but then I think, yes, but …
24-Aug-2019:
I had two rather gnomic microposts yesterday on the subject of Pinterest and grid layout. Here’s the uncondensed version: Pinterest “breaks” the grid — but in …
23-Aug-2019:
Here’s a thought-provoking post from creative writing teacher (and practitioner) Toby Litt on formatting your manuscripts. I’m struck again by the fact that I …
23-Aug-2019:
Obviously, I’m not saying that Pinterest looks anything like one of David Carson’s designs but it does effectively break the grid in the horizontal line and I …
23-Aug-2019:
I didn’t read Anti-Grid Design Icon David Carson Says Computers Make You Lazy … because paywall but I was struck by the idea of anti-grid design, which is new …
22-Aug-2019:
Brad Mehldau has recorded two superb versions of the Beatles’ “And I Love Her”: the solo performance on disc 1 of 10 Years Solo Live and the trio one on Blues …
22-Aug-2019:
MixKit offers “a curated gallery of beautiful art and illustration”, free to use. It’s not clear what’s in it for them, but it looks like it might be a useful …
20-Aug-2019:
this may all be a kind of correlate to income inequality and massive returns for founders…
Tyler Cowen on negative nominal — and maybe real — interest rates.
20-Aug-2019:
Though now rightly celebrated in Ireland, for many decades it was in America, among Jewish-American authors, that O’Brien found a writerly community that …
19-Aug-2019:
while “prizes are a wonderful way to showcase a group of authors … the act of picking a winner is corrosive and part of a capitalist model that doesn’t have a …
19-Aug-2019:
Because of my inability to visualize, I’ve always had problems with motivation, planning and focus. I’m working on that but I’m curious to know if people who …
19-Aug-2019:
contrary to what many people think urbanization increases forestation as does increased agricultural productivity.
That comes as a surprise to me. Sounds like …
19-Aug-2019:
Fans of romances and thrillers … tend to race through books quickly … A duo writing under the pen name Alexa Riley told The Atlantic last year that they …
19-Aug-2019:
The more we regulate language, the more we communicate a social consensus that i