Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Impossible spanners

    Impossible spanners

    I read a book about the thought of Pierre Bourdieu to prepare for reading this, since I knew it leaned heavily on Bourdieu’s theories – ‘cultural capital’ is a concept that Bourdieu introduced and defined. In Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation John Guillory is not discussing that concept in general, but specifically Read more

  • Enjoy with a mince pie

    Enjoy with a mince pie

    This very pretty (in a tasteful, minimalist way) Faber edition of Simon Armitage’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was given to me for Christmas so that I could read it aloud to my painfully cultured spouse and spawn. I’m not sure if I can call it a translation, as I don’t really think of Read more

  • It’s about time

    It’s about time

    I didn’t know anything much about early C.18 English history before I went to see The Favourite, even less about its director, Yorgos Lanthimos, and nothing at all about the film. I’ve since read up a little on some of those topics; not extensively, but enough to have a vague idea what the hell it Read more

  • Traces of lives on geographies

    Traces of lives on geographies

    I’ve been skirting around W.G. Sebald for years. I read The Rings of Saturn, as I suspect many people have in my part of the country, because it is a travelogue through territory with which I am familiar, and then re-read it in some detail as part of my research into the ‘library function’ as Read more

  • Only connect…

    Only connect…

    This short comic by Sophia Foster-Dimino is about relationships. ‘Relationships’ is such a debased and overused word that it has ceased to mean anything at all, except perhaps ‘what couples do other than sex’, so I need to clarify that. Did You See Me? is about network connections between subjects, and the media in which Read more

  • Witness borne

    Witness borne

    It’s hard to know what to do about something like the Armistice centenary; at a hundred years it’s getting quite hard to bridge the historical distance, although as someone in the region of fifty I certainly knew a few people who lived through the First World War. Reading these beautifully reprinted omnibus editions of Charley’s Read more