‘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.
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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.
Neither Alexander nor his generals could have imagined how spectacularly their publicity efforts would succeed. Over the decades and centuries that followed, his legend grew and ramified across the ancient world, taking on new features and larger dimensions.
More interesting than the sentimental evocation of reading as an activity that sets lonely children apart is the conception of authors as would-be ushers of the apocalypse. That books themselves are pregnant with the urge to burn down the world would seem to be part of their appeal. Like many remarks in Cormac McCarthy’s books, delivered in apparent jest or mock solemnity, the character’s words are part of a larger thematic schema that equates language with the destructive power of fire and the bomb.
Toni Morrison is not envious of her characters. They are not punished for the qualities she has given them. Pride does not always come before a fall. Beauty is not bestowed so it might be marred or destroyed. The people in her pages are allowed to love one another and forbear from cruelty. The punishments meted out might be catastrophic, but they have clear origins in the unbearable realities of racism.
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.
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.
PORTLAND, Ore., 14 December, 2022—Drupal, the most powerful open source content management system for everyone from the small non-profit to the enterprise, is launching the latest upgrade to its popular software.
Drupal 10 comes with even more features that Drupal developers and users love. What sets Drupal apart is its flexibility; modularity is one of its core principles. With Drupal 10, users will find even more incredible tools to help build the versatile, structured content that dynamic web experiences require.
Drupal 10 - Continuous innovation in technology and user experience
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 […]
- by Aeon Video
- by Maxime Polleri
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
Influential agribusiness monopolists and food producers appear to be cynically using the war in Ukraine and the aftermath of the pandemic to exert political influence, writes Thomas Perrett
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.
I was having an exchange with an old friend on Mastodon (yes, I’m there now @deanbaker13@econtwitter.net), in which I was arguing that the best way to get alternatives to the current patent system was to have examples of successful drugs developed without relying on patent monopolies. Of course, there are great historical examples, like the […]
The post We Don’t Need Government-Granted Patent Monopolies to Finance Drug Development appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.
In Parliament recently, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese gave his most powerful statement yet in response to a question about Julian Assange's persecution. read now...