Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • 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

  • History dissembled

    Noto, like other cities in the southeast of Sicily, is a near perfect encapsulation of the Sicilian Baroque, built on a planned grid, its buildings designed by notable architects, on a new site selected after the old city’s near total destruction in the earthquake of 1693. In contrast to Palermo it is a well-tended city,… Read more

  • The primacy of the useless

    The primacy of the useless

    For much of my life I have done ‘nothing’, and for almost all of it I have resisted or involuntarily recoiled from the ‘somethings’ that I was supposed to do. At school I was horrified by the expectations of teaching staff and my peers alike, and to this day I fail to grasp the moral… Read more

  • The island’s amnesiac heart

    The island’s amnesiac heart

    At the approximate heart of the island of Sicily there is a site which it is hard not to regard as its historical or spiritual centre, although it is far from the oldest dwelling known there, and certainly not unique in the political and economic power which it embodied – but of course such ascriptions… Read more