Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • A life lived in the kitchen

    A life lived in the kitchen

    I don’t come from anywhere in particular. I’m a Turkish jew with an Italian name on my father’s side, and I’m a characteristically rootless kind of middle-class English on my mother’s, with bits of Norfolk, West-Country, Kent, Wales and whatever-else in the family histories that precede my arrival in a London hospital in nineteen-seventy. But… Read more

  • Slightly scuffed culinary theatre

    Slightly scuffed culinary theatre

    I know about as much about Japanese food as you can find out about Italian food by eating in Pizza Hut. I have eaten sushi, sometimes ostentatiously Japanese in its immediate preparation, but consistently of a character that will be familiar to British consumers. I have eaten noodle soups described as ‘ramen’, but always in… Read more

  • Virtue and privilege

    Virtue and privilege

    Taking in a sampling of the Edinburgh Fringe in the company of a student at Edinburgh University affords a novel perspective. This is our first time at the Fringe since Spawn began studying there, and there is a subtle difference between seeing shows in some of the interesting spaces that happen to exist in the… Read more

  • So long and thanks for all the comics

    So long and thanks for all the comics

      The silver Swan, who, living, had no Note, when Death approached, unlocked her silent throat. Leaning her breast against the reedy shore, thus sang her first and last, and sang no more. Clearly, during the course of his career writing comics, Alan Moore was far from silent, so it would be sublimely ludicrous to… Read more

  • A mysterious semantic plenitude

    A mysterious semantic plenitude

    Yugen Blakrok is a rapper who’s been gaining some notoriety. She had a verse in the Black Panther soundtrack, she’s shared a stage with Public Enemy, she’s released a collab with Copywrite. I wish her all the success in the world, but I’m also quite happy to report that she’s not likely to trouble the… Read more

  • The challenge of generosity

    The challenge of generosity

    Terminology is getting plethoric in questions of gender and sexual identity, perhaps excessively so, given that a significant proportion of the diverse theoretical thinking on such topics sees the taxonomic categories those terms refer to as matters of social construction, rather than ‘things’ that are ‘out there in the world’. LGB begat LGBT, LGBT begat… Read more