Author: Oli
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The truths between instants
‘The camera cannot lie’ is a phrase that has had currency since the last years of the nineteenth century, although it may well struggle to retain any utility in our present era of the digitally constructed image. It was always founded on a stark misunderstanding of visual experience. The camera,…
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The city’s invisible family photographs
The Galleria d’Arte Moderna Sant’Anna is housed in what was once a Franciscan friary. I can’t remember entering it, or how it presents itself to the street; I can simply recall being in it, and how it looks inwards, from all sides, onto its cloistered central courtyard. Where once a…
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The book closed, the world continues
The best speculative fiction, particularly of the secondary-world variety, immerses its readers in its setting, often in initially quite baffling ways, and lets them work out the details of its imagined cultural and social milieu as they go. Sadly Flamesong doesn’t do this, but takes very slim pretexts from the…
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The building which commemorates itself
We were advised by our Airbnb host that the Chiesa del Gesù is one of Palermo’s most beautiful baroque churches from the outside, but he warned us against the interior. In a city where so much has been destroyed and rebuilt, I imagined that we might see something unsympathetically or…
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Moments of erasure
Facing across a busy Palermo street narrow enough to deny its facade any commanding sightlines, the Palazzo Riso-Belmonte is also situated in a city endowed with an embarrassment of Baroque riches. Despite the twin catastrophes of the WWII Allied bombing campaign, and the mafia construction scams of the ‘Sack of…
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Solitary movement through a hauntological palimpsest
Aloy moves alone through her world. Geralt in the Witcher series is constantly bounded and motivated by his social relations and obligations, despite his fundamentally ronin status; in contrast, although the protagonist of Horizon Zero Dawn is provided by her back-story with a social context that explains who she is…
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A positive view from the doldrums
I came across this book on the website of Lib Ed, formerly the Libertarian Teachers Association. It is one of their own publications, written by an author who had also written on topics more obviously relevant to their core mission. Given my interest in all things comics, and 2000AD in…
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Thoughtful speculation
This is a small-format, short, perfectly-formed science-fiction story. Its basic premise would probably be quite implausible technically, if it was elucidated in sufficient detail to get a handle on it, but the way in which its implications are explored is absolutely exemplary as speculative fiction. A spacecraft propulsion technology uses…
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A life lived among relics
Apparently I’ve been to Anglesey Abbey before, according to everyone else in my family who I am claimed to have gone with (and who I went there with this time). This purported visit isn’t supposed to have involved going inside the house, however, so I think I might be forgiven…
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Flawed immersion
Having bought a Playstation 4, the first games console I have ever owned, so that I can play CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 when it comes out, I’ve taken the opportunity to catch up with the same studio’s The Witcher III: Wild Hunt. I enjoyed the second instalment of this…
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A cautionary elegy
William Boyd thinks that The Radetzky March is ‘one of the enduring monuments of twentieth-century European literature’; I’d never heard of it before a friend recommended it to me. It’s quite likely that Boyd hasn’t heard of the books I think are ‘enduring monuments’ either (although I actually think that…
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Stoke-on-huh?
Sam Wade’s Stoke (published by the fabulous ShortBox) is set, presumably, in Stoke. Given that the place-name element ‘stoke’ means (roughly) ‘place’, there are quite a lot of those in England. With its ethnic diversity, mattress store and bare-knuckle kick-boxing, my guess was that it’s probably not the true-blue, rural…
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Molecular anecdoty
I don’t follow cook-book publishing that closely (or indeed at all), but you can’t help noticing a few things if you work in a library. One is that we seem to have bid farewell to the conventions of my youth, where the majority of cook-books were either reference manuals, like…
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Convincing melancholy ghosts
Ég Man Þig is a quietly melancholy horror movie from Iceland, based on a novel by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. Its title translates to English as I Remember You, and it is indeed largely concerned with memory and loss; it is in fact an outstanding example of the way that fantastical forms…
Oliver Arditi 