Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • A shadow play of distant histories

    A shadow play of distant histories

    In parapatric speciation, where two populations diverge in adaptation to varied ecological niches without total reproductive isolation, a sequence of ‘ring species’ can evolve. A commonly cited example is of gulls distributed around the Arctic Circle, where geographically adjacent species, such as the European and American herring gulls, can interbreed, but where the species at Read more

  • Truth, warmth and swing

    Truth, warmth and swing

    Thelonious Monk was an iconoclast, a pianist and composer known for his idiosyncratic approach to life and music, with a reputation among his fellow musicians for being awkward to work with. Miles Davis famously asked him not to comp behind his solo on ‘Bags’ Groove’ in 1954, and some of Monk’s later sidemen complained of Read more

  • Life grooves

    Life grooves

    Jaime Hernandez often uses techniques that seem cinematic; in fact they are no more proper to cinema than they are to comics, but some narrative tactics are available to both fields that have no direct analogy in other story-telling media, known in cinema by terms such as framing, focus, depth of field, camera distance, and Read more

  • Reasonably divergent at the radical centre

    Reasonably divergent at the radical centre

    The ‘reasonable’ is a territory usually delineated not so much by the exercise of reason, as by particular interested accounts of where the exercise of reason should lead you. To someone whose livelihood comes from investing in or managing a capitalist enterprise, revolution looks decidedly unreasonable; to workers in under-regulated industries, subject to arbitrary changes Read more

  • Impossible speech

    Impossible speech

    I have a pet theory. I would like to articulate it eventually through a scholarly monograph, but for the moment it guides my peregrinations through fantasy (and other forms of) fiction, and emerges in partial form in the things I say about it. It is roughly as follows: certain writers in the twentieth-century, predominantly of Read more

  • Risibly dressed stereotypes

    Risibly dressed stereotypes

    What is a person, and how are they manifest in their biography? Jane Austen had an answer to this question, which she presumably thought too obvious to proffer explicitly, but which is evident in the kinds of novels that she wrote, and the ways in which her characters inhabit them. Her assumptions inform her own Read more