What was it I saw in New York?
I’ve been to New York, you know. I went to look at some art in Chelsea, or perhaps the Meatpacking District (the latter sounds so unromantic, but then it’s hard to warm to anything named Chelsea). I set off […]

Pepys, Dostoevsky, and Skinner: John Sutherland’s imprimatur means this Streets piece can leave the callow lowlands of NYLPM and be linked on the Wedge instead. My major problem with the article – aside from Sutherland’s reading of […]

DEAD MAN’S CHESS: (Three Questions abt Treasure Island pt 3)
#3 (and LAST): Why did the pirates not win?
Basically Treasure Island is an argument about the nature of authority: at sea*, this zone of lawless democracy, sovereignty is his who c[…]

DEAD MAN’S CHESS: (Three Questions abt Treasure Island pt 2)
#2: What are Long John Silver’s politics? (sorry this is v.long: scroll down to excellent = less homework-y stuff from sarah and mike g. and tom)
i. Even if we agree that the […]

AS MAN BECOMES MACHINE!
No, not a link to the mad TRON geezer (arrrgh mein eyes), but instead, my latest purchase from the charity shop: Man Becomes Machine:The Chilling Investigation of Humanity’s Robot Future, by David M. Rorvik.
Originally[…]

Uncomfortable Reading
I collect old travel literature on Europe and the Americas. I can’t explain the appeal, but it combines elements of dusty covers and rifling through damp shops in Hay-on-Wye.
The more offbeat the finds, the better. Two wo[…]

Mordillo: Euro-cartoon giant who leans more to the droll than the funny – site contains expansive and somewhat frightening CV detailing the dizzying range of Mordillo merchandising and licensing, with one sad exception: the remarkable touch-scr[…]

Treasure Island: a reply to ms.
Wendy Katz’s ‘Introduction’ to the Centenary Edition (Edinburgh UP, 1998) comments that ‘inquisitive readers have attempted to match the historical data with the fictional dates in the text to e[…]

DEAD MAN’S CHESS: or
Three Questions abt Treasure Island
#1: When is it set? JimH is famously coy (“I take up my pen in the year of grace 17__” only gives a clue abt when he WROTE it) but there are clues. i. The King is a George =[…]

Outlaws by George V. Higgins
I’ve read negative reviews at times of books that seem to swing into entirely different directions towards the end, as if it’s a failure of the book, but it’s something I like. Aristotle’s unities […]