Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Open worlds

    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 brother Jake saved until I Read more

  • Everything happens only once

    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 in 1997, and I’ve just Read more

  • My grandfather’s hats

    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 grandfather Reyner Banham’s case, his Read more

  • A work of play

    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, especially given that its lumbering Read more

  • The source

    The source

    Reading the second volume of Rebellion’s sumptuous collected Nemesis The Warlock has been a real pleasure. It hasn’t been a revelatory experience, in the way that reading the first volume was, as I have already been reminded what Nemesis is like, how good it is, and how mind-blowing its art. The majority of Nemesis The Read more

  • A joy

    A joy

    One of the leading South American festivals of electronic and experimental music, I gather, is Novas Frequências, held somewhere in Brazil (the website for the 10th edition, held last year, doesn’t seem to specify!) The festival’s curator, Chico Dub, also curated a series of compilations between 2013 and 2016, ten volumes under the rubric of Read more