Category: Books
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Veils of allusion
Iain Sinclair walks London’s sacred geometries, pursuing a dérive that moves obliquely across the familiar, prosaic territories of the city. Or he consecrates the geometries of his walking. Or he territorialises a sacred ambulation. This triangle, of place, movement and meaning, is the tripod on which these two short books…
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Ruthlessly imagined
It’s very unusual for me to read a recently published novel, much less a prize-winning one. This is mainly because my reading is usually thematically led, as in my current exploration of psychogeographic, mnemonically focussed, and narrative-spatialising work, which has kept me busy with the back catalogues of W.G. Sebald,…
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Other truths in the shadows
I got stressed out reading Logicomix. About halfway through the book there is a discussion of Russell’s paradox, a self-contradictory proposition in set theory. Very simply, it posits a set of all sets that do not contain themselves. At the time he stumbled upon it Bertrand Russell, whose biography Logicomix…
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A pamphlet in disguise
A book is illustrated if it has pictures in it. A history is illustrated if the events it constructs are shown in the pictures that accompany it. Admittedly not everyone will sign up to my definitions, but I’m not too convinced that Portraits of Violence fits the second of them.…
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A life lived in the kitchen
I don’t come from anywhere in particular. I’m a Turkish jew with an Italian name on my father’s side, and I’m a characteristically rootless kind of middle-class English on my mother’s, with bits of Norfolk, West-Country, Kent, Wales and whatever-else in the family histories that precede my arrival in a…
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Impossible speech
I have a pet theory. I would like to articulate it eventually through a scholarly monograph, but for the moment it guides my peregrinations through fantasy (and other forms of) fiction, and emerges in partial form in the things I say about it. It is roughly as follows: certain writers…
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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…
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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…
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Migratory death-drives
Emigration seems to offer a fresh start, a blank slate; this is often what is hoped for by those that practice it. In many cases, of those fleeing conflict or extreme economic deprivation, this is a more than reasonable aspiration, and the contrast that is occasioned by a successful migration…
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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 few wooden buildings
Places have memories. This is not to propose the pathetic fallacy that they have feelings, consciousness, thoughts or intentions, but that in the same manner that a certain synaptic pattern preserves a trace of experience in the brain, features of landscape and cityscape preserve traces of biography. Of course subjective…
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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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The book closed, the world continues
The best speculative fiction, particularly of the secondary-world variety, immerses its readers in its setting, often in initially quite baffling ways, and lets them work out the details of its imagined cultural and social milieu as they go. Sadly Flamesong doesn’t do this, but takes very slim pretexts from the…
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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…
Oliver Arditi 