Our sphere of the real was riddled with simulations, yet was the world at hand. Or the simulation was riddled through with the real. […] The world was ersatz and actual, forged and faked, by ourselves and unseen others. Daring to attempt to absolutely sort fake from real was a folly that would call down… Keep Reading
I began reading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts four or five months ago. I say ‘began’ because I haven’t really stopped since. I pick it up several times a week to sink back into particularly beautiful passages, or plumb further her more layered and difficult observations. I have a slightly wary suspicion that I will be… Keep Reading
Words from a tiny town in a far off corner of Iceland. This is a landscape of edges and surfaces. What looks like the sky is actually the mountain, its steep, hard cliffs jutting darkly out from under the snow and looming over the town like a tidal wave. The sky exists only as the… Keep Reading
“If a bookshop contained all the books ever written, what are the chances that you would find the one book you need? … No, the perfect bookshop is small, small and selective.” (Mark Forsyth, The Unknown Unknown, 2015) A bookshop is essentially a place of conversation. Whether it is conducted in private between you and… Keep Reading
How much can be said about what cannot be explained? Resonance: Something in a book corresponds with something in me, and vice versa. Though I immediately know what I mean, this insight crumbles as I try to communicate it. One way to explain resonance would be to try to identify the aspects of the book that I resonated with, e.g. language, composition,… Keep Reading
In the world of today, our individual worth in society is measured in output, in productivity, in competences. Reading as a slow, inward and undirected activity is therefore its own act of resistance against and within a neoliberal agenda. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and goodnight! Here you are, in an unspecified time, most likely… Keep Reading
“If religion is an answer, if political ideology is an answer, then literature is an inquiry; great literature, by asking extraordinary questions, opens new doors in our minds.” (Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 1990). Okay, this is going to sound like I’m 80 years old. For the record, I’m not! But when I first started working… Keep Reading