Art Kavanagh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How about “Neatly tied up and unflinching”?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I just Googled one of my own publications as a quick, handy way to find the citation details, to include in a blog post. Google’s AI summary was — surprise, surprise! — way off, totally misleading. Why would anybody think that this garbage is useful or helpful?

Remember “grey goo”? Why hasn’t it destroyed the world yet? Techno-pipe dreams

The fallout was rapid. Facing impeachment and likely criminal charges of corruption, Supreme Court justices Thomas and Alito resigned, while Gorsuch and Kavanaugh decided that their appointments had been improper all along.

Sheer fantasy, I’m afraid 😒

Nicholas Carr has reupped his venerable Is Google making us stupid? essay, which is now 17 years old and still timely.