1.
The last twelve to eighteen months have taught me that if you put something on the internet, everybody will see it. People rarely comment on-line, but I seem to get all kinds of bizarre responses when I see them in public, ranging from facial expressions that look like they’ve swallowed a bullfrog (and are struggling to keep it down) to, ‘What’s with all the leather gear?’ Or even, ‘Are you a Satanist?’ Continue reading
Haruki Murikami’s Dance Dance Dance has one of the best first pages I have read, but I’m still going to give it away.
The novel opens as follows: Continue reading
It is said that unconditional love is the kind of love we should aspire to; it’s the state of loving in which you love someone, regardless of whether they love you in return, or even treat you well. It is to achieve a state of selflessness as a result of your feelings.
It has occurred to me that this is not always a good thing. Continue reading
I read Kafka’s The Trial earlier in the year, and it was a boring read that paid off in a big way by the end. Continue reading
Anyone who likes to read must have read Catcher in the Rye – and loved it. Continue reading
“But who is that on the other side of you?”
-T.S. Eliot,
The Waste Land.
For seven of its eight episodes, the first season of True Detective was some of the best television I have seen to date. I prefer to forget the final episode because it was so shithouse, but that’s another story. The series really hits its straps at the end of episode 3 with Rustin Cohle’s monologue, visible here.
The show has the three features present in all ‘great’ films and t.v. shows; Continue reading
Things I Don’t Want To Know by Deborah Levy does not, judging from the blurb on the back, sound like the sort of book I’d like to read.
‘…it is feminist and political while being an inspiring act of writing.’
Whenever a book is ‘feminist and political’, it’s like being hit over the head with a length of dowel; irritating and painful, but not hard enough to knock you out – or into unconsciousness so you don’t have to listen anymore. Continue reading
“When I came home: on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat sided steep frowns over the present world, I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock, with corroding fires he wrote the following sentence now perceived by the minds of men, & read by them on earth.
How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?”
– William Blake,
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Hinton in 1968, the year ‘The Outsiders’ was published. Smart, hot and pigtails.
“Raymond Chandler wrote about the man he wanted to be. Dashiell Hammet wrote about the man he was frightened he’d become.”
-James Ellroy. Continue reading
Theme Park at its Darkest 