Author: Oli
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The temporary truths of moving targets
The sociologist and social philosopher Pierre Bourdieu is one of those (many) writers and thinkers to whose ideas I have been exposed, and which I have haltingly deployed, without ever really investigating their work. I have finally got around to doing so, in Bourdieu’s case, by way of preparing to…
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A humane document
Mother London was something of a surprise to me, inasmuch as it’s something I needed to read, something that should have been more or less top of my reading list, but which I simply happened to read by chance. Firstly it was chance that I happened to spot it in…
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Angry apotheosis
I read bits and pieces of Charley’s War as a kid, in copies of Battle picked up from jumble sales and charity shops, but I was never a big fan of war comics, so I didn’t exactly follow it. The episodes I did see made a big impression on me…
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Ammunition
Behave is a behemoth of a book. Unless you know quite a lot about neurobiology already, you’ll need to read the appendices: including those, it clocks in at seven-hundred and seventeen pages. You may well be familiar with longer reference books, or textbooks, or even novels, but this is a…
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Sculpted in the clay of language
Christopher Tolkien made it perfectly clear in Beren and Lúthien, published in 2017, that it was the last book he would produce as the editor of his father’s considerable legacy of unfinished writings. As he was then in his 93rd year, this seemed a reasonable point at which to hang…
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Implausibly realistic
I’ve got to admit I don’t really know Spike Lee’s oeuvre. When certain directors release a new movie I fee able to talk quite confidently about their creative progression, the development of their technique and so forth. What I do know about Lee’s formal approach is that he is given…
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Beaten, stabbed, tossed into traffic and hospitalised
A review of a comic like Kick-Ass really doesn’t mean much unless it’s written by someone who closely follows the commercial comics which are its creative context. It is itself a commercial comic, but in more or less exactly the same way that Quentin Tarantino makes films about cinema, it…
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The opposite of psychogeography
Patrick Rothfuss is an excellent writer slumming it in the undemanding environs of commercial fiction. Don’t get me wrong – I enjoyed reading The Slow Regard of Silent Things. It is a novella with much to recommend it, a pleasing book, a pretty book, written with a deft touch technically…
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Can you skate theory?
Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body (to give this academic monograph its full title), is a work of architectural history — which is to say that it is not about the history of buildings, the history of the built environment, or the practice of architecture. Iain Borden’s…
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A gorgeous, rip-roaring feminist yarn
I started reading Monstress for a bit of relief in the midst of researching my masters dissertation – it was vaguely relevant, as I was looking into teratology (the study of monsters) as it relates to the idea of alterity and to fantasy fiction, but mainly it was an easy-to-read…
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What happens next?
Christopher Tolkien has probably now reached the end, in terms of publications at least, of his life-long project to edit and clarify his father’s huge opus of unfinished writings. He says that this book, Beren and Lúthien, will be the last, and as he is now 93 this seems plausible.…
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No spoilers (well, one)
I’ve been mystified by Gene Wolfe for my entire adult life, and then some. His books are famously tricksy, with unreliable narrators, and hidden plots that we are supposed to unearth from clues distributed carefully through the text. This is not what I like them for, particularly, or perhaps it…
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Short slick shred
I didn’t know much about Frank Quitely until I went to an exhibition of his work in Glasgow last summer. Given that he’s an artist who works in the top tier of Anglo-American commercial comics this is not surprising: I pay very little attention to the sort of superhero rags…
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Heroically strange
And so The Prophet concludes. What started as the ostensible re-boot of a retired and obscure superhero can take its place on the library shelves as one of the most extraordinarily inventive science-fiction comics in the English-language tradition, and hopefully as an enduring element of the canon that is being…
Oliver Arditi 