Art Kavanagh - Newsletter

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.

A look at Andrew Marvell’s use of second person singular pronouns in “To His Coy Mistress” (and a few paragraphs about “The Gallery”)

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

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

Because there was no new newsletter post at the weekend, here’s a reminder of some old ones.

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.

Today’s newsletter post in Talk about books was meant to be about The Mill on the Floss, which I’ve just finished rereading but I didn’t manage to get the post written, for which I apologize.

I think I might have been overdoing it with novels by young Irish women. My latest newsletter post is about Caoilinn Hughes’s The Alternatives, the previous one featured Naoise Dolan. Now I’ve read ⅔ of Niamh Campbell’s This Happy and I’m very tempted to put it aside for several months 📚 🤷🏻‍♂️

Good news: at last I’ve found another person who shares my poor opionion of the Coen brothers’ films.

Bad news: it’s Geoff Dyer 😒

Here’s his review of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film, About Dry Grasses🍿

Caoilinn Hughes’s third novel is about four sisters who go to varying lengths to avoid each other’s solicitude, even when they might need it.

I’ve preferred Billy Wilder’s 1974 version of The Front Page to His Girl Friday ever since I first saw the Wilder film. I’d have been at a loss to explain why till I read Alan Jacobs’s evisceration of the earlier movie 🍿

Naoise Dolan’s first novel is among much else an exploration of language as both a medium of communication and a vast and complex human artefact. Her Substack reflects similar interests.

“The three most powerful men in the world are a walking version of the dark triad: Trump is a textbook narcissist, Putin is a cold psychopath, and Xi Jinping came to rule [China] by being a master Machiavellian manipulator.”

Luke Kemp, author of Goliath’s Curse

What some of us want to know is why orange juice, which people can live without, is getting a break, while coffee, an absolutely essential nutrient, isn’t.

Paul Krugman, Trump/Brazil: Delusions of grandeur go south. The 50% tariff on imports from Brazil to the US.

Do you remember the name of Bob Dole’s running mate in 1996? I didn’t. (I can remember the name of Walter Mondale’s in 1984, though.)

A discussion of seven of the stories in Mavis Gallant’s collection Home Truths (1985), including the Linnet Muir sequence.

The building next door to me is being painted and the painters are using a kind of small crane that emits a warning sound like a reversing lorry … constantly, for hours on end. It’s been going for 2½ hours today already. Oughta be a law.

Still Life📖, the second book in A S Byatt’s tetralogy, and easily my favourite of the 4, is the only one I no longer have a copy of. I saw a battered copy in the Oxfam shop today and thought about buying it. But I didn’t, and I wonder why, as David Crosby said. Never going to reread the other 3.

Nine Queens (Nueve Reinas) is being rereleased 🍿. I used to have it on DVD … still do, I just found it.

Are a few people ruining the internet for the rest of us? the Guardian headline asks. Well, yeah, obviously. People like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Sundar Pichai for starters.