Jon Fosse doesn’t use sentences, or prefers not to end them. When you open Septology, with its smallish print and narrow margins, it can feel like a death sentence – all the more so since the book, much possessed with death, runs to more than eight hundred pages. There are no paragraphs or full stops here. Fosse has called the writing ‘slow prose’ and it lingers on moments – hours even – when nothing much happens.
Reading
The most common complaint about Dickens in his lifetime was that he exaggerated, that his characters were implausible specimens of humanity. Prince, too, was seen as going far beyond the norm, especially in his sexuality (he developed a guitar that could be wanked off over a crowd, spattering them with water; he wore backless trousers at the VMAs).
22 October. One casualty of Covid (and I don’t think it’s age) has been chronology. These days I’m often confused by what day it is, not to mention the date. Keeping the diary has been a different sort of casualty as politics became difficult to ignore and Boris Johnson tedious to chronicle. By the time I’d got round to Liz Truss she’d gone.
If I think about the concept of sea level hard enough, I experience disorientation, almost motion sickness, as awareness grows that I’m not living on solid ground but on a sinking chunk of planetary crust, on the surface of a not-really-spherical spinning globe, at the mercy of the nearest star, two icecaps and a capricious moon that sloshes the oceans to and fro like a child rocking in an over-filled bath.
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 1 (Friday 16 December 2022)
Jacopo’s San Pier Maggiore altarpiece was too large and cumbersome to fit onto a single wall in its original, three-tier configuration. For almost thirty years, the panels were arranged across two walls, the Coronation of the Virgin and attendant saints facing the other two tiers across the room. Displayed this way, the work lost not only a sense of its intended function but also much of its symbolism.
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 1 (Friday 16 December 2022)
For British nationalists and imperialists, it has always been uncomfortable to think of Roman London as a medium-sized provincial capital on the periphery of someone else’s empire. It’s even worse to think of it as dependent on state subsidies from a Roman (read: European) superpower; or to face up to the city’s decline in the fifth century following the dissolution of imperial infrastructure and the final withdrawal of troops to the Continent – a kind of enforced Brexit.
The magpie came back to the courtyard & its deep chill the magpie was a jay was a jackdaw was a bird in Germany if not a German bird. Whither the Carolingians and their monks whose recipes...
‘Like having my skull opened with a tin-opener,’ Angela Carter said about reading Baudelaire as a teenager. Discovering the Claudine books, even at my age and with my Bataille phase far behind me, I recognised what she meant. What is known and not known, shameful or not shameful, permissible and impermissible: it’s all done differently in Colette.
Research into the generation and interpretation of what computer scientists call natural language processing has made extraordinary progress over the last ten years, and powerful systems now...
George Michael was the biggest selling musician in the world in 1988. He was 25 and seemed ready to outdo Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Prince and Madonna. In Freedom Uncut, Liam Gallagher describes him as a ‘modern-day Elvis’. Fans and the record business wanted more: more music, more appearances, more concerts, more everything. Almost disdainfully, he signed a multimillion-dollar, multi-album deal with CBS, and, with Michael installed as its flagship act, Sony bought out the company for $2 billion.
The fire was lit most evenings, except in high summer, but in Aberdeen you were sometimes glad of it then too. Our 1960s decorative brick fireplace was the heart of the household. It was there for warmth, but it had a significance beyond the heat it provided. It seemed to ease something, or enable something – a wordless sharing of domestic space.
Alessandro Manzoni was born in 1785, the only child of an arranged marriage between Giulia Beccaria, daughter of the Milanese intellectual Cesare Beccaria, and Pietro Manzoni, a minor nobleman....
Along with ridding the home society of unwanted people and criminals, transporting men and sometimes women to distant places made available rich supplies of coercible labour. In virtually all overseas and overland imperial territories, ‘convicts’ of various sorts became vital frontier workers and sometimes active agents of expansion and consolidation. If they died in the process, or became hobbled by disease, who really cared? It was part of their punishment.
Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander is currently back in cinemas, forty years after its first release in Sweden. Both early and late on in the film, there is talk of a ‘little...
Official Chinese publications emphasise the multiethnic and multicultural character of Xinjiang, but no one who spends time there can be in any doubt that Islam dominates Uyghur society. At the root of the present conflict in Xinjiang is the perceived threat that Islam-inspired Uyghur nationalism poses to the integrity of the Chinese state.
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This latest version brings Drupal to the next level with a modernized backend look and a future-proof platform upgrade. The updated version delivers powerful new features and an enhanced user experience.
When we renewed our roster of bloggers a little while ago, I mentioned that there would be more announcements to come. Today I’m very happy to say that Macarena Marey will be joining us at Crooked Timber. I met Macarena a few years ago at a workshop in Bayreuth and was immediately impressed by her […]
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Iain Overton meets the unwell residents of Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican town trapped between the guns of the north and the drugs of the south
Daniel Christen and Nicola Shadbolt Geoeconomic fragmentation is one of the greatest risks to the international monetary and financial system at present, particularly since Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Fragmentation is likely to have wide-ranging implications for the global economy, including increasing the volatility of capital flows and exposing gaps in the global financial … Continue reading Precautionary facilities: stitches for a fragmented financial safety net
I have been drinking alcohol since I was 15.