My assault on the pop music of literature continues, albeit akin to buying The Strokes album now. Franzen’s The Corrections then; a doorstep sized beach novel made for slightly shingly, uncomfortable beaches. We are in “great American no[…]

King Rat by China Mieville
I’ve enthused wildly over his second and third novels (Perdido Street Station and The Scar) here, and finally got around to his first. The others are set in SF-fantasy worlds, while this one is in London, but hardly t[…]

What I Did In The Holidays
Well, I’ve now held a copy in my hand so I’m finally prepared to believe it really exists. Not sure when the official publication date is (tomorrow according to the publisher, “not yet” according to[…]

Underwater Gnome Threat ‘Returns’: shudder.
(Filed under ‘when art installations attack’)[…]

Superheroes and Philosophy: how you react to this project will depend on how you react to a sentence like:
Tom Morris is the most active public philosopher of our day, and is author of sixteen previous books, including Philosophy for Dummies, The Art[…]

GF Watts
Among the green waves of the North Downs and straight outta the tiny village of Compton is the GF Watts Gallery. No more than a coaching post between Guildford and Godalming, it is a quiet rural place with an extraordinary gallery. ‘Ce[…]

FIVE POINTS
by Tyler Anbinder
New York City lore is something I know a bit of but couldn’t care much about otherwise — this is because I’m a horrible person, of course — but more to the point it’s generally alien to my e[…]

HIDDEN LONDON #2: Bell Green, Catford
erm i don’t know much more about than that it exists – which i didn’t know even this morning – but on my way through it from bromley back to london bridge my TRAIN HIT A TREE!!
branches […]

Walls
http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/personalities/fleeting/index.htmlMarshall
Sokoloff’s fotos are large-scale c prints of graffiti that havebeen painted over by civil authorities in places like Toronto andPortland. The great thing is […]

Shark
Apparently Damien Hirst’s shark is falling apart in his tank, and it is almost impossible for conservators to fix it–he got bad advice in he beginning, and now the New York museum of Modern Art has hired the curator of fish from the[…]