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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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