Author: Oli
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Aesthetic symbols
Having been interested in comics for a very long time, I have of course been aware of manga. Until now, I haven’t read any, and my only knowledge of the genre has been second-hand, either through anime adaptations like Akira, or by reading what other people have written about it.…
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Central admixture
Having recently read and written about Quicksilver, the book which precedes The Confusion in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle trilogy, there’s relatively little that I feel compelled to commit to my journal in respect of the The Confusion. To say it contains ‘more of the same’ sounds dismissive, but that’s essentially…
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Vivid conviction
Martin Scorsese enjoys making films about criminals. He likes representing their lives and their culture, and he often collaborates with actors who can improvise well, generating free-flowing, vernacular dialogue that’s sometimes hard to follow, but which creates an immersive sense that the audience is sharing their world with them. He’s…
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Rhyming cinema
One thing I’ve had reinforced through watching the Rudolph Maté directed Robert Mitchum vehicle Second Chance (1953), is the total disconnect between Golden Age Hollywood movies and their posters. This is not a particularly egregious example, but still: ‘sky-high excitement atop a South American peak’ refers to scenes set and…
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For the bakers
I’m fortunate enough to be closely related to someone (my mum) who is something of an authority on the state of scholarship around bread and baking, and she recommended Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery as remaining one of the best secondary sources, more than forty years after its…
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Light touch, heavy themes
I inhabit a timeline in which the definitive version of Michael Moorcock’s huge fantasy sequence is The Tale of The Eternal Champion, available in your version of reality only in second-hand copies which sometimes slip between the parallels and turn up for sale in independent bookshops (or on Amazon). In…
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Mumbling in the pocket
On the last day of last year, the death was announced of one of the most enigmatic and under-recorded figures in alternative hip-hop, which had occurred two months earlier. MF Doom reached his greatest commercial success, and most would say his creative peak, in collaboration with Madlib, with whom he…
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Surface is depth
Orlando is a very complex and sophisticated film based on a very complex and sophisticated book which I haven’t read. For this and other reasons I’m sure I missed a great deal when I watched it, but I was thoroughly entertained. It has a very post-modern, nineties sheen to it…
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No conflict
The American economy has had its ups and downs—in the 1970s manufacturing crashed so badly that several large cities were pretty much wiped out. But when the financial crash hit in 2008 the economy was less obviously predicated on a few huge industrial employers, and the ensuing collapse was more…
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Open worlds
Aladdin Sane was my first Bowie album. Not the first Bowie I heard, and not even the first of his albums I listened to, but the first one I lived with until I learned it. It was among a collection of albums that had belonged to my dad, that his…
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Everything happens only once
My exploration of Kim Stanley Robinson’s oeuvre is proceeding in a kind of pincer movement, reading books alternately from either end of his writing career, and closing in on the midpoint. I didn’t start right at the beginning, having read several of his earlier novels already, but with Antarctica, published…
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My grandfather’s hats
It’s a strange privilege to have had a grandfather who was, as he once put it, ‘world famous to five hundred people’. He was actually downplaying his public profile there, although that’s a fair description of many academics, whose disciplines tend to be both obscure and globally distributed. In my…
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A work of play
This Neal Stephenson dude likes to go large. Enormous books, with vast casts of characters, containing epic and sprawling storylines that tackle thorny and fundamental philosophical problems—all done in an irreverent and humorous way. Of all his fiction that I’ve read so far, Quicksilver seems the apotheosis of these tendencies,…
Oliver Arditi 