There is something of a small, personal and perhaps entirely trivial pleasure in opening up the file of a review one is working on, thinking it needs a lot more work, and looking at it and realising that it's more nearly done than one supposed. Then tapping out a couple more paragraphs and deciding that, no, really, this is probably all that needs ( Read more... )

What between this:
The inimitable Nancy Banks-Smith on The night I watched Vera Lynn with Marlene Dietrich [T]hat image has stayed with me for more than half a century because I don’t quite understand it. Marlene Dietrich listening so intently to Vera Lynn and whipping herself.
It's like a scene from one of the movies she did with von Sternberg, no ( Read more... )

I sent off for free delivery vouchers some weeks ago, but when they turned up, whoever was delivering our neck of the woods was over capacity and no longer taking any more customers. But idly checking the site last week I saw that it is now possible to set up delivery (and I also have prepay vouchers), though not whether this is with same supplier ( Read more... )

If a novel was good, would you care if it was created by artificial intelligence?
My immediate thought just on reading the headline was, there are certain critics, I fear, who would be more inclined to praise a novel written by an AI than one written by a woman or indeed anyone who was not a DWM or eventually aspiring to that category.
My second ( Read more... )

Hmmm: OK Boomer, tell us how to set up an underground abortion-provision network? ‘You have to stand up to illegitimate authority’: what veteran abortion activists can teach us in the Trump era: Last year, Heather Booth headed from her home in Washington to Georgia to tell, once again, the story of Jane. It was a disheartening moment, to consider ( Read more... )

Um, more like the Groundhog Day experience, what with Jonathan Jones breathing heavily in art galleries: Private passions: the sexual secrets hidden in the world’s greatest art. I.e. combing through visual images in search of a sexual subtext... Perhaps he should take a cold shower before setting out, and start concentrating on artists' mastery of ( Read more... )

We will concede that Jonathan Jones has significant form for exposing the seedier contents of his id under the guise of performing art criticism - it was only last year that he outed himself as upskirting in imagination the artists' model whom he believed to have posed for Courbert's L'Origine du Monde when she happened to be painted fully clothed ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished the Pauline Kael biography: not sure if it's just that somebody whose career was basically sitting in darkened cinemas watching movies and then writing about them is not going to be wildly exciting, and it's by its nature going to be mostly about her critical opinions and spats with other critics, directors she dissed, etc, or ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Give Me Your Hand, which was good but grim (and also has led to my being recced large nos of 'psychological thrillers', which, as a general thing, are on my do.not.want list).
And then sunk into one of those reading troughs when I could not think of anything I particularly wanted to read next, either from the massive tbr piles ( Read more... )

And pontificate generally. A certain Mr J- J- who writes on ART in The Guardian yet again makes us ask, what are they teaching them in art-critic school these days, or possibly back in the 1950s?
Godwin encouraged his daughter’s own feeling for art, taking her to studios including that of JMW Turner. But painting, like making a monster, was a man’s ( Read more... )