Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • 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

  • What happens next?

    What happens next?

    Christopher Tolkien has probably now reached the end, in terms of publications at least, of his life-long project to edit and clarify his father’s huge opus of unfinished writings. He says that this book, Beren and Lúthien, will be the last, and as he is now 93 this seems plausible. This seems like an appropriate… Read more

  • No spoilers (well, one)

    No spoilers (well, one)

    I’ve been mystified by Gene Wolfe for my entire adult life, and then some. His books are famously tricksy, with unreliable narrators, and hidden plots that we are supposed to unearth from clues distributed carefully through the text. This is not what I like them for, particularly, or perhaps it is, but it’s not the… Read more

  • Short slick shred

    Short slick shred

    I didn’t know much about Frank Quitely until I went to an exhibition of his work in Glasgow last summer. Given that he’s an artist who works in the top tier of Anglo-American commercial comics this is not surprising: I pay very little attention to the sort of superhero rags he tends to draw, and… Read more