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Doing it every day
Watching the second film in our self-selected route through Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, I had in my mind the strengths and shortcomings of Mangrove, the first one we saw. That film is incredibly sharp on the politics, the history, and the drama of the events it depicts, but somewhat weaker on character development and… Read more
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A fairly tail
Well, that’s two ShortBox comics in a row with a cultivated visual naïveté. However, where Núria Martínez’s Outspace is very obviously a digital work, Charlotte Mei’s Pipette & Dudley: Charming Dog Adventure wastes no opportunity to foreground the physicality of its artwork, the texture of Mei’s thick impasto bulging off nearly every page. When I… Read more
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Excavating justice
I don’t come from Suffolk, but I’ve lived here the vast majority of my adult life, and I have family roots across Suffolk and Norfolk. If I feel a sense of belonging to anywhere, it’s here. The green, gentle hills, the un-British lack of rainfall, the distinctive speech patterns of its inhabitants… this place belongs… Read more
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Rigorously nourishing
This album was a gift from a friend, who I imagine had it recommended to him for its prog connections, but found it a bit too spicy when it arrived. I had it hanging around for several years before I gave it a really deep listening, but now I have… wow. Centipede were a fairly… Read more
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Getting off the train
One of the books that has made the greatest impact on me is Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. In that tetralogy the protagonist pledges his allegiance to a rebel leader, and after an epic series of adventures finds himself face-to-face with the authority against which he is rebelling—at which point it is revealed… Read more
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Expert hand-holding
Worldbuilder, storyteller—these are Philip Pullman’s great strengths for me. As a ‘novel-maker’ he’s stuck in a rather old-fashioned, comfortable mode which doesn’t respond well to an overly critical reading, and as a philosopher (which all but the most unreflective authors of speculative fiction must be) he has some blind spots. The delicious pleasure of a… Read more
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