Well, I wasn’t going to blog tonight (sleeping being very preferable), but while reading in the bath I’ve just had a fascinating collision between three interesting writers, so I thought I’d do a quick post. So – I’d been planning to start on a novel, but couldn’t be bothered, so took Adorno’s ‘Minimalia Moralia’ inContinue reading “On becoming an optimist”
Category Archives: Modernity
Pulp street indeterminacy
Well, it’s blog-o-clock again, and today’s pulp fiction pondering has been triggered by an exceptionally interesting essay about different modes of poetry by Reality Street supremo and exceptionally cool modern poet Ken Edwards. Here’s some of his poetry; and here’s the essay. Edwards launches a sustained assault on systems of reading that privilege a (relativelyContinue reading “Pulp street indeterminacy”
Science, the future and my Luddite superpowers
Well, it’s been a frustrating time for me technologically over the last week or so; I seem to have developed some kind of weird anti-modernity super power. On return from America, I discovered that my boiler had stopped working; a plumber came and ‘repaired’ it last Friday, but it’s still not going. Last Thursday, myContinue reading “Science, the future and my Luddite superpowers”
HD and Modernism
So – Hal Duncan and Modernism. Well, his writing (particularly ‘Vellum’, as I’ve still got to sit down properly with ‘Ink’) is profoundly modernist in structure, relying on fractured narratives, parallels between individual sub-narratives, broad, deep allusiveness and massive stylistic experimentation to communicate meaning. But it avoids the worst excesses of High Modernist mandarin-ism throughContinue reading “HD and Modernism”
Pounding system
Well, I’ve come down from the weekend a little more but in the aftershock I have put my back out! So now I am hobbling round my flat like a little old lady – but as well as a lovely evening with H watching Venture Brothers et al, memories of the weekend are buoying meContinue reading “Pounding system”
Flattering amnesia
John Clute makes a fascinating point in the current Interzone – ‘[contemporary planetary] horror is what happens when amnesia fails’. He goes on to reference W. G. Sebald, who alas I haven’t read, so of course I fell to thinking about H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe – and, of course, amnesia itself. What’s fascinatingContinue reading “Flattering amnesia”