Category: Non-fiction
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The elision of geography
At the age of fourteen I was lucky enough to spend a few hours, one afternoon in Los Angeles, with the two writers who were then probably the best known skalds of that city’s architecture – Esther McCoy and my grandfather, Reyner Banham. It was not an edifying afternoon, as…
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A memory of speech
We speak, and sometimes we are heard. An impression remains in the memory of our auditors, and although it is not our speech, we and they treat it as such. Eventually, that recollection is occulted or extinguished, in both speaker and auditor, and for the most part, no trace remains…
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A positive view from the doldrums
I came across this book on the website of Lib Ed, formerly the Libertarian Teachers Association. It is one of their own publications, written by an author who had also written on topics more obviously relevant to their core mission. Given my interest in all things comics, and 2000AD in…
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Molecular anecdoty
I don’t follow cook-book publishing that closely (or indeed at all), but you can’t help noticing a few things if you work in a library. One is that we seem to have bid farewell to the conventions of my youth, where the majority of cook-books were either reference manuals, like…
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Generous manoeuvres in the cosmic dark
Juice Aleem has an inclusive attitude to his cosmic voyage. There seems very little reason for anyone seeking to revalue the markers of difference by which they have been excluded to invite white people along for the ride, but Juice Aleem makes very clear that they, along with a list…
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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…
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The temporary truths of moving targets
The sociologist and social philosopher Pierre Bourdieu is one of those (many) writers and thinkers to whose ideas I have been exposed, and which I have haltingly deployed, without ever really investigating their work. I have finally got around to doing so, in Bourdieu’s case, by way of preparing to…
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Ammunition
Behave is a behemoth of a book. Unless you know quite a lot about neurobiology already, you’ll need to read the appendices: including those, it clocks in at seven-hundred and seventeen pages. You may well be familiar with longer reference books, or textbooks, or even novels, but this is a…
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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…
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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…
Oliver Arditi 