Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • A ritual of sipping and nibbling

    A ritual of sipping and nibbling

    I am wearing my new coat. It is a rather jaunty, fashionable coat, but it is also very smart, so I feel quite in command of the situation as we enter the Signet Library in Edinburgh. I have elected to go scruffy for this visit to the city, rather than taking the tweed-jacketed option, but… Read more

  • Veils of allusion

    Veils of allusion

    Iain Sinclair walks London’s sacred geometries, pursuing a dérive that moves obliquely across the familiar, prosaic territories of the city. Or he consecrates the geometries of his walking. Or he territorialises a sacred ambulation. This triangle, of place, movement and meaning, is the tripod on which these two short books stand – anthologised in a… Read more

  • A fable for the devouring

    A fable for the devouring

    This book smells great. It’s a slim, perfect-bound volume, in a tall, narrow, custom format, printed to a very high standard, its pages heavy with dark ink. I want to eat it. Its physicality, its insistent presence as an object, is paralleled, and probably produced in part, by the solidity of Ariel Ries’ figure drawing.… Read more

  • 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