Author: Oli
-
A world of experience
I’m not too sure why it’s taken me so long to get around to reading Hilary Mantel’s novels about the life of Thomas Cromwell—I probably found the whole award-winning thing a bit off-putting, as I have a variety of reservations about prizes and awards. I do know, however, a lot…
-
Smart roots
I’ve been following the work of James Beaudreau since he sent me a trio of beautifully packaged CD albums for review around ten years ago. Those records contained experimental acoustic guitar music, driven by an interest in the presence and specificity of musical utterances—often signifying as much in terms of…
-
History of tradition
I think I’ve burnt myself out on research now. There’s a lot more I could read to expand my thinking on the areas that will feature in the stories I plan to write, but I’ve been working on the background for so long, and I am so close to being…
-
Specifically dense
Michael Woodman is a lover of words. On his most recent album in particular, his lyrics display an affinity for extremely specific and little used terms such as petrichor, the scent raised by rain falling after a long spell of warm, dry conditions, and psithurism, the sound of rustling leaves.…
-
An orrery of thought
Having finished reading Neal Stephenson’s epic historical trilogy The Baroque Cycle it’s quite hard, on reflection, to recall everything that’s in it. It has to be one of the densest, most detailed, and most complex works of fiction I’ve ever read. It is also really a single novel, although each…
-
Judging hope
Martin Compston is best known for appearing in the entertainingly silly police fantasy Line of Duty, but his first acting role was in the grimly serious Ken Loach movie Sweet Sixteen in 2002. He was at the beginning of a career as a professional footballer, and auditioned for the lead…
-
Keeping faith
Frank Herbert’s Dune has been a part of my life for many years—I started reading it for the first time just before I started secondary school. I re-read it several times, along with its sequels up to Chapterhouse Dune, after which I stopped trying to stay abreast of the series.…
-
Putting medicine in its place
The historian Roy Porter was known during his lifetime as a ‘one-man book factory’, a prodigiously productive scholar who wrote or edited over 100 books—proper books, mind you, not light novels dashed off in a weekend, but major chunks of work based on original research. He took early retirement in…
-
The last man who knew everything (about bread)
Mostly if I want to find out about something (I call it ‘research’ when I’m feeling self-important), I look on Wikipedia. If I need to go a bit deeper then I make a big stack of books on the subject and make notes on them. When I’m choosing books to…
-
Between bodies and speakers
Sampling became one of the most significant new techniques in record production during the 1980s, and although its influence on subsequent uses made of samples is debated, My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts was probably the first album to make them a central plank. David Byrne and Brian Eno…
-
Nurture writing
I read an interview with Suzanne Simard in New Scientist and it brought tears to my eyes. Her description of the realities revealed in her career as an experimental scientist gave me such a sense of validation and hope that I immediately pre-ordered the book she was plugging, Finding the…
-
Hardy perennials
Kim Stanley Robinson is known for not writing stories about soldiers, or other stereotypically heroic figures—which in our deeply fucked-up cultures are almost always the purveyors of violence. Instead he writes about scientists, administrators, politicians, activists, engineers, labourers, artists, writers, craftspeople, and so on. The kind of characters that seem…
-
Ordinary voices
Ordinary voices get so little time and exposure that we tend to forget what they sound like, despite the fact that, by definition, they’re the voices that we hear every day. Somehow it comes to seem that the kind of speech we hear in TV dramas, in the lyrics of…
-
Old school concision
Much of the development of videogames passed me by, despite my early and continuing interest, thanks to my long voluntary exile in the Apple Mac gaming ghetto. Since I finally bought myself a console about three years ago I’ve been catching up, with a particular focus on the last ten…
Oliver Arditi 