Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • A moment

    A moment

    This small, landscape-format book contains a lot of landscape, and a lot of episodes in which people engage with landscape. Its cover shows the narrator, closely aligned to, but clearly non-identical with the author, Jen Lee, who is not a bipedal cow; she is sitting alone and contemplating a rural prospect. This does not show Read more

  • Ruthlessly imagined

    Ruthlessly imagined

    It’s very unusual for me to read a recently published novel, much less a prize-winning one. This is mainly because my reading is usually thematically led, as in my current exploration of psychogeographic, mnemonically focussed, and narrative-spatialising work, which has kept me busy with the back catalogues of W.G. Sebald, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore and Read more

  • Explaining the wrong man

    Explaining the wrong man

    We all tell ourselves stories. This happened because that happened. At this time of my life I was on a great quest for whatever. All these bad things happened because so-and-so was out to get me. Once upon a time there was a child, who learned x, y and z, and grew up to be Read more

  • Other truths in the shadows

    Other truths in the shadows

    I got stressed out reading Logicomix. About halfway through the book there is a discussion of Russell’s paradox, a self-contradictory proposition in set theory. Very simply, it posits a set of all sets that do not contain themselves. At the time he stumbled upon it Bertrand Russell, whose biography Logicomix is, was working on set Read more

  • A pamphlet in disguise

    A pamphlet in disguise

    A book is illustrated if it has pictures in it. A history is illustrated if the events it constructs are shown in the pictures that accompany it. Admittedly not everyone will sign up to my definitions, but I’m not too convinced that Portraits of Violence fits the second of them. Its pages are laid out Read more

  • The start of a new history?

    The start of a new history?

    Roughly as long as my life has had something resembling its present form, I’ve been going to the Angel in Stoke-by-Nayland. Initially it was an outlier, as the Black Horse was a fairly standard pub (which nobody I knew went to, owing to the pathological unfriendliness of the owners), and the Crown was a failed Read more