Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Putting food in its place

    Putting food in its place

    A sense of collective memory is crucial to most people’s sense of self; few seem as happy as those who know where they are from. I’ve always had a slightly difficult time finding out this ostensibly simple fact about myself: on my father’s side it could be Istanbul, or Santiago in Chile, but I feel… Read more

  • A cunning naïveté

    A cunning naïveté

    Kingston-upon-Hull is one of those cities that likes to celebrate its dialect. When I first visited, arriving in a small, wooden-hulled, retired fishing trawler, we went to drink off our sea legs at the Minerva. This is an iconic pub overlooking the marina, one of the first sights to greet anyone reaching Hull up the… Read more

  • Knowledge, from extraction to production

    Knowledge, from extraction to production

    The approach to Giles Gilbert Scott’s menacing Ministry of Truth building in Cambridge is designed to diminish and belittle the pedestrian penitent, to crush their spirit with the giant phallus of authority that rises above its forbidding entrance, looming over the city like a threat. However, if one is forewarned that this ‘magnificent erection’ (as… Read more

  • 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