Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Story in fragments

    Story in fragments

    So, what to do with yourself when you’re confined to your house during a global pandemic? Watch all of the Coen Brothers’ films in release order, obviously. Although we actually started in the middle by re-watching Fargo so that Spawn could start watching the TV series with us. But now we’ve rewound to the mid Read more

  • State of the planet

    State of the planet

    At the age of eighteen I was a dope-smoking, layabout, benefit-scrounging squatter. During this phase of my life I was arrested for shoplifting. The thing I stole, however, was not food, or something I could sell to buy drugs, but a book. It was The Atlas of the Solar System by Bill Yenne, and it Read more

  • Caricatures on parade

    Caricatures on parade

    I’ll come clean. Although I have some idea what it’s like inside a book by Charles Dickens, I’ve never actually read one. I started a few in my teens, but there wasn’t anything about their openings that made me want to read on, and nothing I’ve heard anyone say about Dickens (even Jorge Luis Borges, Read more

  • Good hair days

    Good hair days

    I keep threatening to cut my hair short. Spouse forbids it. Sometimes though, it feels like such a hassle wearing it long, and trying to make myself look presentable in public when bits and tufts are flying in all directions, sticking out from under whatever headgear I’m sporting, feels impossible. Historically I’ve not had much Read more

  • Character profiles

    Character profiles

    The characters in Uncut Gems are busy. We see them from the side, metaphorically and often literally, brushing past the viewer, utterly absorbed in the complex and frantic business of living their lives. The camera’s narrative eye just drops into the middle of their confusing, interwoven existences, and watches as they get on with it. Read more

  • No fable

    No fable

    Once you’ve made the hole the central metaphor of a lengthy work of fiction, you’re going to have to resign yourself to a whole mess of Freudian baggage. Whether you bring them with you, as part and parcel of your understanding of psychology, or they’re ascribed to your work irrespective of its contents, or they Read more