Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • 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

  • Decide for yourself

    Decide for yourself

    There are stories and there are libraries. Libraries are not only repositories of completed stories, but the raw material from which stories are constructed, the sets of possibilities, arranged spatially, that are sometimes placed into sequence to form narratives. This dichotomy, between the settled order of a story as told and the branching web of… Read more

  • Pale glimmerings of ambiguity

    Pale glimmerings of ambiguity

    Singer-songwriter albums often foreground the songs, to the extent that there is more or less nothing to distinguish the way they are performed or recorded from any other singer-songwriter album. Some appropriate, accomplished guitar work, some appropriate, accomplished vocals, some lyrics, and some melodies. When the writing itself reproduces established conventions around melodic narrative and… Read more

  • A hangover cure in the form of a building

    A hangover cure in the form of a building

    Comfort comes in nostalgia-sized portions, and for the eponymous ‘Mum’ that nostalgia is focussed on the 1970s. This is evident in the decor at Mum’s Great Comfort Food in Edinburgh, in the period TV quotes on the menus, rendered in appropriate typefaces, and to some extent in the menu, although it is probably more characterised… Read more