2024-12-19
I read 74 books this year. I’m not reviewing them all; I don’t remember them all. However, a few of them stuck with me for various reasons: The Golden Notebook, The Magus, The Interrogators, Martyr!, Money… It’s been a good year.books
2024-03-10
For the past few months the days have been long and dark. Somewhere in the middle there it snowed and it stuck for a couple of weeks, slowly hardening into sheet ice. We’re through most of it now. Last week, in the courtyard behind the apartment the trees started to bud, and now there’s sun enough to catch the green rippling along all their branches. Spring, maybe. In the dark months I kept my head down and worked.Notes from Granta 165 (Deutschland)
2023-12-27
Notes from a really damn good issue of Granta about Germany. Featuring non-fiction by Alexander Kluge, Peter Handke, Fredric Jameson, Lauren Oyler, Michael Hofmann, Peter Kuras, Adrian Daub, Peter Richter, Lutz Seiler, Ryan Ruby, Jan Wilm and Jürgen Habermas. As well as a conversation between George Prochnik, Emily Dische-Becker and Eyal Weizman.2023-12-16
The world is enough to make you crazy. The city is enough to make you crazy. The building is enough to make you crazy. The way lint builds up on the desk right in front of you, given enough of everything else, is enough to make you crazy. I’ve deliberately contracted in the past couple of years. I’ve tried to become less of a jangly ball of reactive nerve endings. I think I used to be a gaping maw that inhaled current affairs from near and far and exhaled analysis and anxiety.2023-11-27
It feels like there’s a lot of war going on. Whenever that happens I really feel my ignorance; it seems like if thousands of people are dying about something, I should understand what that something is. So here’s what I’ve been reading lately about war.
2023-11-22
Right now I am in England. It’s the first time I’ve been back since we moved away to Germany and being here has immersed me back in some old themes… like the British class obsession. A little while ago I read Bright Young People, about a certain set of upper class enfants terribles who were the first of a kind of person that is now splashed all over Hello magazine. One of that set was Evelyn Waugh, who wrote a send up of the whole gang that I’ve just finished reading: Vile Bodies. The book is full of social climbers, aristocrats, nobility and the dreary functionaries of government too. All of this to say, did you know you can read what all the royals are up to on any given day in the Court Circular?
2023-08-29
While I claim that the reason I haven’t emerged as the foremost British emigré writer of our times because I simply don’t have time between watching movies and drinking beer: Franz Kafka wrote stories on the side, at night, when he was tired. Enjoy this profile not of his literature, but his day job: “I am more interested in his insurance affairs.”
2023-06-19
I think I’ve given up on systems that organise the world, even the world right around me. Even so, it’s nice to dream about a way of living where everything is fast, smooth, organised… easy. That’s why I still look at consumer electronic products and software even though I have long accepted none of them will make me happy in an enduring way. Picture then, a world where everything (everything) I have is organised into numerical folder trees.2023-04-25
We are about to share a media experience together. Please switch off and put your phone away. Please switch off your smart watch and annihilate any other illuminated sources of time. Please strive to be entirely within the world created by the shared experience rather than in your own life or even your own body, whose use should be constrained to the sense organs need to consume the experience and the parts required for breathing, crying, and perhaps laughing.2023-02-17
So Popbitch (a very catty UK media gossip newsletter) reports that Fred Again’s people have been trying to keep the fact that he is minor gentry out of his Wikipedia article. Fair enough. I understood his story to go as follows: young South London guy makes poppy dance songs during the pandemic, goes viral, becomes instant stadium-packing act once the restrictions lift, and boy he just can’t believe his luck. Shucks!