Author: Oli
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Slightly scuffed culinary theatre
I know about as much about Japanese food as you can find out about Italian food by eating in Pizza Hut. I have eaten sushi, sometimes ostentatiously Japanese in its immediate preparation, but consistently of a character that will be familiar to British consumers. I have eaten noodle soups described…
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Virtue and privilege
Taking in a sampling of the Edinburgh Fringe in the company of a student at Edinburgh University affords a novel perspective. This is our first time at the Fringe since Spawn began studying there, and there is a subtle difference between seeing shows in some of the interesting spaces that…
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So long and thanks for all the comics
The silver Swan, who, living, had no Note, when Death approached, unlocked her silent throat. Leaning her breast against the reedy shore, thus sang her first and last, and sang no more. Clearly, during the course of his career writing comics, Alan Moore was far from silent, so it…
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A mysterious semantic plenitude
Yugen Blakrok is a rapper who’s been gaining some notoriety. She had a verse in the Black Panther soundtrack, she’s shared a stage with Public Enemy, she’s released a collab with Copywrite. I wish her all the success in the world, but I’m also quite happy to report that she’s…
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The challenge of generosity
Terminology is getting plethoric in questions of gender and sexual identity, perhaps excessively so, given that a significant proportion of the diverse theoretical thinking on such topics sees the taxonomic categories those terms refer to as matters of social construction, rather than ‘things’ that are ‘out there in the world’.…
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Putting food in its place
A sense of collective memory is crucial to most people’s sense of self; few seem as happy as those who know where they are from. I’ve always had a slightly difficult time finding out this ostensibly simple fact about myself: on my father’s side it could be Istanbul, or Santiago…
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A cunning naïveté
Kingston-upon-Hull is one of those cities that likes to celebrate its dialect. When I first visited, arriving in a small, wooden-hulled, retired fishing trawler, we went to drink off our sea legs at the Minerva. This is an iconic pub overlooking the marina, one of the first sights to greet…
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Knowledge, from extraction to production
The approach to Giles Gilbert Scott’s menacing Ministry of Truth building in Cambridge is designed to diminish and belittle the pedestrian penitent, to crush their spirit with the giant phallus of authority that rises above its forbidding entrance, looming over the city like a threat. However, if one is forewarned…
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A shadow play of distant histories
In parapatric speciation, where two populations diverge in adaptation to varied ecological niches without total reproductive isolation, a sequence of ‘ring species’ can evolve. A commonly cited example is of gulls distributed around the Arctic Circle, where geographically adjacent species, such as the European and American herring gulls, can interbreed,…
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Truth, warmth and swing
Thelonious Monk was an iconoclast, a pianist and composer known for his idiosyncratic approach to life and music, with a reputation among his fellow musicians for being awkward to work with. Miles Davis famously asked him not to comp behind his solo on ‘Bags’ Groove’ in 1954, and some of…
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Life grooves
Jaime Hernandez often uses techniques that seem cinematic; in fact they are no more proper to cinema than they are to comics, but some narrative tactics are available to both fields that have no direct analogy in other story-telling media, known in cinema by terms such as framing, focus, depth…
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Reasonably divergent at the radical centre
The ‘reasonable’ is a territory usually delineated not so much by the exercise of reason, as by particular interested accounts of where the exercise of reason should lead you. To someone whose livelihood comes from investing in or managing a capitalist enterprise, revolution looks decidedly unreasonable; to workers in under-regulated…
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Impossible speech
I have a pet theory. I would like to articulate it eventually through a scholarly monograph, but for the moment it guides my peregrinations through fantasy (and other forms of) fiction, and emerges in partial form in the things I say about it. It is roughly as follows: certain writers…
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Risibly dressed stereotypes
What is a person, and how are they manifest in their biography? Jane Austen had an answer to this question, which she presumably thought too obvious to proffer explicitly, but which is evident in the kinds of novels that she wrote, and the ways in which her characters inhabit them.…
Oliver Arditi 