Themes that recur in James Purdy’s later work include power struggles (liable to sudden inversions), extreme emotional states (also subject to reversal), and polar contrasts of riches and poverty, youth and age. Moments of poetic magic rather than developments in plot or character make the experience of reading compulsive.
Reading
Graveyard of St Peter-in-the-East, St Edmund HallFor E.M.Snowdrop, snowdrop, tell:what news of the underground,the weather in Hell?Your toes are tickledby the beards of the dead, theirslanted...
Humza Yousaf narrowly won the SNP leadership against Nicola Sturgeon’s former finance secretary Kate Forbes, a member of the fundamentalist Free Church of Scotland, who emerged from the contest as the backbench standard-bearer of the social and fiscal conservatism that still lurks within her party and in the Scottish media. Perhaps the SNP really is ‘doing it deliberately’, and taking the left for a ride.
The Portuguese were said to be uniquely at home in the tropics, their colonies places of multiracial harmony. Portugal’s empire was fated to endure. In the 1950s and 1960s, as anticolonial movements gathered strength, Salazar’s regime continued to insist that Portuguese imperialism was different from other forms of European colonial rule. Lídia Jorge is alert to the hypocrisies of lusotropicalist rhetoric.
Other people aren’t hell, Lauren Berlant writes, just bothersome, ‘which is to say that they have to be dealt with’. Why is it so hard to live with other people? And why do we seek to ease the friction of intimacy and collective life even as we are driven towards encounters that create friction?
By piecing together the details of Lourenço da Silva de Mendonça’s campaign, José Lingna Nafafé shows that abolitionism began not with William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, but with a transnational African movement a century earlier. In order to make this case, he has to reconstruct the complex and intertwined worlds of Angola, Brazil and Southern Europe in the 17th century.
Fans make no pretence of balance or reason. They are drunk on irrationality and obstinacy, hurling themselves after the fortunes of their chosen team, band, TV show or celebrity. A fan may feel aggrieved at the unfairness of the world (as embodied in a referee, critic or prize panel), but the last thing they aspire to be is fair. A fan is someone with a dog in the fight.
Positioned higgledy-piggledy in London streets, a battery of defunct cannons threatens to destroy ordinary people’s homes and livelihoods, day-to-day infrastructure and basic amenities, art and nature, new things and old things. You would be hard pressed to find a better metaphor for the current political regime and the national climate it has produced.
The military-industrial complex (MIC) that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans about more than 60 years ago is still alive and well. In fact, it’s consuming many more tax dollars and feeding far larger weapons producers than when Ike raised the alarm about the “unwarranted influence” it wielded in his 1961 farewell address to the nation. The statistics are stunning. This year’s proposed budget for the Pentagon and nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy is $886 billion — more than twice as much, adjusted for inflation, as at the time of Eisenhower’s speech. The Pentagon now consumes more than half the federal discretionary budget, leaving priorities like public health, environmental protection, job training, and education to compete for what remains. In... Read more
Florida lives down to its image It was a tad disorienting the first time I entered a public men’s room in Europe and there was a woman attendant standing inside keeping the place clean and neat. But what the hell. When in Rome, right? (Was it Rome?) So it’s hard to understand the parochial freakout on the American right over trans people using bathrooms. Well, not that hard. They react to anyone outside their black-and-white categories as they might at encountering a snake or a spider the size of a Buick. With a visceral shudder. Count on Florida to model how to overreact for the rest of MAGAstan (Washington Post): Florida’s legislature Wednesday passed a bill that bans transgender people from using many bathrooms and changing areas that match their gender identity, on penalty of criminal trespass charges, in the latest spate of anti-LGBTQ legislation that has been taken up by state lawmakers. A small number of Republicans joined their Democratic colleagues in opposing House Bill 1521, which applies to schools, government buildings, prisons and detention centers. It now heads to the desk of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who is expected to sign it into law.
. Comme l’a soutenu Braunstein, le wokisme est une véritable religion sectaire absurde. Il est évident qu’il est en train de construire un nouveau totalitarisme de la pensée quasi-religieuse. Et c’est certainement une attaque farouche contre la science et contre la vérité. Mais il est aussi un mouvement sociopolitique qui a gagné en popularité ces […]
‘It’s totally unnecessary… They are disenfranchising people.’ Josiah Mortimer and colleagues report from across England as ID is rolled out for the first time.
1.
In love two melons are. Yet run off and marry they do not. Why?
Because elope, they cannot.
- - -
2.
On a seafood diet, I am. Food I see; eat it I do.
- - -
3.
I sense much fear in six. Fear of seven. Why?
Because nine, seven ate.
- - -
4.
YODA: Knock knock.
LUKE: Who’s there?
YODA: Banana.
LUKE: Banana who?
YODA: Knock knock.
LUKE: Who’s there?
YODA: Banana.
LUKE: Banana who?
YODA: Knock knock.
LUKE: Who’s there?
YODA: Banana.
LUKE: Can we wrap this up?
YODA: Patience you must have. Knock knock.
LUKE: Who’s there?
Zarina Zabrisky explains how Putin’s seizure of the company property is just a continuation of his state-sponsored looting which began 30 years ago in St Petersburg
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: AHS, Nancy Drew, AEW, Wednesday, Always Sunny, Creature Commandos, Velma, Star Trek: Picard, and tons more!
Brian Latham explores the relative success of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s private military company - effectively a mining company with guns – and its clash with China in a new scramble for Africa
People sometimes speak as if random variables “behave” in a certain way, as if they have a life of their own. Thus “X is normally distributed”, “W follows a gamma”, “The underlying distribution behind y is binomial”, and so on. To behave is to act, to be caused, to react. Somehow, it is thought, these […]
On this week’s Lever Time: David talks with a leading artificial intelligence expert about whether we should rage against the machines.
Campaigners warn of vote-splitting as new analysis finds that the ‘progressive’ vote will be more split than the right in 69% of England’s council wards on 4 May
- by Aeon Video
- by Krithika Srinivasan & Chris Pearson
"That's not how white men fight."
Finding my queer future in the past.