Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Sculpted in the clay of language

    Sculpted in the clay of language

    Christopher Tolkien made it perfectly clear in Beren and Lúthien, published in 2017, that it was the last book he would produce as the editor of his father’s considerable legacy of unfinished writings. As he was then in his 93rd year, this seemed a reasonable point at which to hang up his red pencil (or Read more

  • Implausibly realistic

    Implausibly realistic

    I’ve got to admit I don’t really know Spike Lee’s oeuvre. When certain directors release a new movie I fee able to talk quite confidently about their creative progression, the development of their technique and so forth.  What I do know about Lee’s formal approach is that he is given to juxtaposing documentary or newsreel Read more

  • Beaten, stabbed, tossed into traffic and hospitalised

    Beaten, stabbed, tossed into traffic and hospitalised

    A review of a comic like Kick-Ass really doesn’t mean much unless it’s written by someone who closely follows the commercial comics which are its creative context. It is itself a commercial comic, but in more or less exactly the same way that Quentin Tarantino makes films about cinema, it is also a comic about Read more

  • The opposite of psychogeography

    The opposite of psychogeography

    Patrick Rothfuss is an excellent writer slumming it in the undemanding environs of commercial fiction. Don’t get me wrong – I enjoyed reading The Slow Regard of Silent Things. It is a novella with much to recommend it, a pleasing book, a pretty book, written with a deft touch technically and some real imagination. It’s Read more

  • Can you skate theory?

    Can you skate theory?

    Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body (to give this academic monograph its full title), is a work of architectural history — which is to say that it is not about the history of buildings, the history of the built environment, or the practice of architecture. Iain Borden’s book is a theoretically informed Read more

  • A gorgeous, rip-roaring feminist yarn

    A gorgeous, rip-roaring feminist yarn

    I started reading Monstress for a bit of relief in the midst of researching my masters dissertation – it was vaguely relevant, as I was looking into teratology (the study of monsters) as it relates to the idea of alterity and to fantasy fiction, but mainly it was an easy-to-read comic with pretty pictures. Volume Read more