Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • The truth is a collage

    The truth is a collage

    We recall and communicate experience as coherent, continuous, meaningful – it is so important to us to do so that we will construct sometimes heartbreakingly arbitrary meanings to impart coherence to our experience of happenstance, as when a child ascribes the disappearance of a parent to their own failings. But while experience is necessarily meaningful, Read more

  • Past the blank horizon

    Past the blank horizon

    Timothy Leary, the 1960s prophet of psychedelic self-transformation, saw parallels between seekers of enlightenment and seekers of oblivion. I forget where, perhaps in the introduction to The Psychedelic Experience, he observes that the sanyasi and the addict both seek the means to detach their consciousness from the continual demands of the material, to find peace, Read more

  • A gently chromatic narrative

    A gently chromatic narrative

    The Island is a short and beautiful allegory. It’s a simple exploration of solitude, of withdrawal, of re-engagement, and of the fear we may feel of aspects of ourselves. The story is told with a minimum of dialogue, and a lot of delicately shaded crayons. It’s a consequence of the ways that comics have developed Read more

  • Journey’s end

    Journey’s end

    Eight kilometres to the north, and many lifetimes away from Noto, lie the remains of its corpse. Here was journey’s end for the continuous relay that connected Jesuits, merchants, nobles, criminals, prisoners, artisans, guardsmen and peasants to the Iron Age Sicel people, after whom Sicily is named, Noto’s founders; to Daedalus, who stayed there after Read more

  • Achimeric multistable fusion

    Achimeric multistable fusion

    Something said in a primary school playground in a dispute over parental status, one assumes, Hard Normal Daddy is one of my favourite album titles. It’s also one of my favourite albums, although I haven’t lived with it as long as other Squarepusher releases, having come at Tom Jenkinson’s oeuvre in a rather haphazard order Read more

  • Same difference

    Same difference

    How To Be Autistic is an important book. There are, I imagine, countless books about autism: medical books, popular science books, memoirs of the parents of autistic children,  heart-warming novels about cognitively impaired savants (think of the Barry Levinson film Rain Man), and so on. Since the word autismus was coined by the Swiss psychiatrist Read more