Web links

in

Here are a few of the better things I have read online this week.

  • The great Robert F. Worth on role reversal in Libya for the NYT. The plot of novel by Elias Khoury combined with the restraint of great reportage http://nyti.ms/KXkpL8.
  • (Speaking of which, the wonderful archipelago books has just published an English translation of Khoury's As Though She Were Sleeping -- you can hear Khoury talking about the book here).
  • Here is an interesting Dan Diner essay from Mittelweg 36 on Jean Améry's once much-read essay on torture. It contains the following suggestive comment on French history:

"French history is marked by a unique constellation. An West-East historical orientation focuses on events in Europe, on the continent. A North-South perspective foregrounds events in the colonies. In actual fact, the two axes – the horizontal and the vertical – merge with the one another. This has significant consequences both on the plane of reality and in the realm of memory."

Read More

Free throws and Miniatures

in
Like taking a free throw, painting miniatures is a work of reduction. Both basketball player and miniaturist look back upon a bodily tradition, and a memory of practice, and each tries to free himself from the present: for the basketball player, it is the anxiety of the moment, but also those "other working parts" -- the heavy limbs and beating heart -- which constitute his prison, while for the miniaturist, it is the temptation to innovate, and the eyes that might lead one astray, that mean that the highest art of observation is practiced by those than cannot see.
Read More

Sunday Film Notes

in

What we talk about when we talk of the weather (something approaching a review of Margin Call)

I.

As much as I love the darkened space of the cinema, where I can be anyone, if just for a moment, when I turn up, unannounced and cold, outside one of those big commercial duplexes, and tell myself that inside, in the warmth, there shall be miracles awaiting me, I always feel as if I am acting in bad faith.

I’m not really expecting to see film. I just want to find the world outside, inside that dark, welcoming room.

Read More

New Podcast On Hunting

in

I have just put up the first of what will be a semi-regular series of podcasts. It is a reading of the essay On Hunting, which I published back in January. You can listen to it here. In the coming months I will post a series of new podcasts, combining readings of texts I have published, with discussions of literature and politics with guests.

Once I have worked out what the mysterious "byte-range requests" problem is, you should also be able to subscribe to these podcasts via itunes. Stay tuned...

A Sketch for the Tent of the Future

in

I have an essay in the new edition of the wonderful Canadian architecture magazine, Onsite Review. The essay is on Libyan history, the nomadism at the heart of Qadhafi's dreams of direct democracy, and different ways of thinking about the relationship between the urban the rural. There is a small taster just below the fold, and you can read the whole article here.

Read More

On Hunting

in
People get hunters all mixed up, and think they are looking for what is rare or elusive – the thing that might give them the slip, and scurry away down some furtive alley if it were not for the hunter’s state of constant awareness. On the contrary, for the hunter, there is too much world, and all of it is clamouring for attention. Nothing rare or elusive here.
Read More

Droning On

in
I used to work in a call center in which we were instructed to make 50 calls an hour. Our pay depended on us fulfilling this quota. Most hours, this didn't prove to be a problem. At 7pm, there was a list of thousands of old grannies eager to be divested of their retirement fund. Things got trickier, however, on the night shift. At 3am, who do you call to fulfill your quota?
Read More

Stasis-Noise-Heaviness

in
Simply put, one needs to leave in order to arrive anywhere. And leave where? Where one is comfortable: the shock of the new is always the other thing that is invariably compared to home (when I think of something, I always think of something else), which is why tourism is so apparently seductive, because what one experiences is home, again and again. Leaving simply brings into relief the contours of home: the expensive holiday that reveals the rich businessman at his house (one is never more at work than when one is spending); the photographs, already taken in order to recycle the world just above the fireplace, used to stand testimony to a world outside of home...
Read More