The name Johann Hari rings some sort of bell, and it has a certain crack of doom in it?
Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen.
You, dr rdrz, know me by now, and that I am a hedjog who looks askance at a lovely rosy vision of the somehow unified consciousness of the past (was that TS Eliot?), that Past when Things Were Better and we lived ( Read more... )

Apparently there are 'writers brought to a state of despair by the novel' and This seems especially true for the more ambitious writers working today. Where fiction comes with too many formal obligations and a suffocating set of prescribed subjects, in non-fiction it seems you can write about almost whatever you like, and in something closer to ( Read more... )

But the other day I came across a Twitter thread about dealing with born-digital archives, and the case study they were talking about was, Will Self's emails.
Will. Self's. emails.
Apparently his papers have been acquired by the British Library and being processed, and he's not even dead yet. Self is a particularly interesting writer from the point ( Read more... )

For not so much 'did not do the research' as 'I am too big and important a writer dealing with The Big Universal Themes to do Petty Steenking Research', and pretty much makes the bingo card*:
[Q]uirky, ambitious and ultimately disappointing: The costumes and scenery change, but the essential set of relationships remains the same.
....
The narrator ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature: 1939-51, and I pretty much want to dig up all the men and flog them mercilessly with well-rotted codfish, particularly Cyril Connolly. Honestly: they were all of them perving after much younger women, exploiting them rotten, etc etc - can't help feeling that Barbara Skelton was the avenging ( Read more... )

The latest thing in mimsy, ahistorical, 1950s cosplay: Tradwives.
Goodness knows there is a long and tiresome tradition of women, who can afford to (or making a nice little earner off it), lecturing other women on feminine submission as the One Troo Way.*
Do I have to rehearse, yet again, how synthetic a vision this is? Very little like the actual ( Read more... )

Who is this guy, and why is he arguing from his own anomie vis-a-vis the novel (and maybe half-a-dozen mates he spoke to in some hipster hangout or other the other week) to make this A Big General Point?
I stopped reading novels last year. I think you did too.
Solipsism much: 'My primary evidence for the death of the reader is the death of my own ( Read more... )

(Maybe there ought be a self-help group for people who, reading the name 'Will Self' on a column or a review, are powerfully moved to heave out a codfish? Or is this an entirely understandable shared reaction?)
Anyway, Mr W.S. has writ a memoir, entitled Will, reviewed here, and as, in the sidebar, there is a link to Mr Self's interview in which he ( Read more... )

As my flight is this evening, checked out of my room and checked my luggage and set off to walk to Downtown.
I contrived part of this through a nice park with a lakeside meandering Japanese garden, but then struck streets again and came to the realisation that the trouble with the map is that it leaves out numerous streets and avenues so gives a ( Read more... )

We are delighted to see that a Real Victorian Historian has been invited to undertake the unsavoury task of reviewing The Victorians by Jacob Rees-Mogg, and that she wields a mighty codfish upon him: In parliament, Rees-Mogg is often referred to as “the honourable member for the 18th century”, a nod to those funny clothes he wears, along with ( Read more... )