Author: Oli
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Thrills and white poppies
It’s subtly positioned and easy to miss, but beneath the volume number, and below Rebellion’s logo on the spine, on each volume of this beautifully re-issued Charley’s War omnibus, is a white poppy. Nobody reading this could possibly miss Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun’s intentions, but the old Titan Books…
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Realistically surreal
Is the reality we construct for ourselves from our sensory inputs an orderly one in which every phenomenon is readily explicable, and chains of causation are visible, like the universe described by science? Or is it a confusing one in which things happen for mysterious reasons, and odd symbolic resonances…
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Fear of the unknown
I only ever read H.P. Lovecraft’s work in a haphazard manner, and my familiarity with his oeuvre has owed as much to Sandy Petersen’s 1980s role-playing game Call of Cthulhu as it has to the few stories I read before diving into this mammoth volume. His imaginary milieu, the so-called…
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A videogame: how sad
I’ve always run a bit behind the times with video games, although I’ve been a fan since the early 80s, so it’s very unusual for me to have played through a state of the art game less than six months after release. As I’ve also just recently emerged from the…
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Generous manoeuvres in the cosmic dark
Juice Aleem has an inclusive attitude to his cosmic voyage. There seems very little reason for anyone seeking to revalue the markers of difference by which they have been excluded to invite white people along for the ride, but Juice Aleem makes very clear that they, along with a list…
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Unofficial beauty
Pingu, a TV series I enjoyed entirely as an adult, has a special place in my heart similar to that reserved for the cultural artifacts of my childhood. For one thing it was on TV when the spawn was small; for another it has a brilliantly infectious, funky theme tune…
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Impossible spanners
I read a book about the thought of Pierre Bourdieu to prepare for reading this, since I knew it leaned heavily on Bourdieu’s theories – ‘cultural capital’ is a concept that Bourdieu introduced and defined. In Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation John Guillory is not discussing that…
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Enjoy with a mince pie
This very pretty (in a tasteful, minimalist way) Faber edition of Simon Armitage’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was given to me for Christmas so that I could read it aloud to my painfully cultured spouse and spawn. I’m not sure if I can call it a translation, as…
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It’s about time
I didn’t know anything much about early C.18 English history before I went to see The Favourite, even less about its director, Yorgos Lanthimos, and nothing at all about the film. I’ve since read up a little on some of those topics; not extensively, but enough to have a vague…
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Traces of lives on geographies
I’ve been skirting around W.G. Sebald for years. I read The Rings of Saturn, as I suspect many people have in my part of the country, because it is a travelogue through territory with which I am familiar, and then re-read it in some detail as part of my research…
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Only connect…
This short comic by Sophia Foster-Dimino is about relationships. ‘Relationships’ is such a debased and overused word that it has ceased to mean anything at all, except perhaps ‘what couples do other than sex’, so I need to clarify that. Did You See Me? is about network connections between subjects,…
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Witness borne
It’s hard to know what to do about something like the Armistice centenary; at a hundred years it’s getting quite hard to bridge the historical distance, although as someone in the region of fifty I certainly knew a few people who lived through the First World War. Reading these beautifully…
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Decoratively knowable
Monstress is really getting cracking now. Volume Three: Haven is clearly still well within the originary story arc, without any of the far-fetched desperation typical of series that have been running too long. Of course much of Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s opus is in many ways extremely far-fetched, but…
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Making space
I funded this wonderful independent project on [insert name of well-known pre-funding site], and then when the slim volume arrived it somehow got mulched in my enormous piles of books and I never read it. I recently found it (hooray), and also found out it had a follow up (hooray)…
Oliver Arditi 