Telling Details

I read the new collection of old essays by Joan Didion. All the works were previously published but none of them had made it in to any previous compilation of her work. There is a Foreword by Hilton Als. I wondered at first if it would turn out that these essays hadn’t been collected before […]

Flag-Waving

I watched The Eight Hundred, the most successful film of 2020. It is about the battle for the Sihang Warehouse, the final phase of the 3 month Battle of Shanghai in 1937. At the very start, there is a dedication to the fighters portrayed in the movie, which also cites the Chinese Nationalist Party for […]

Hand In Glove

I watched the 1982 TV adaptation of A Kind Of Loving by Stan Barstow. Although I did not watch it at the time, I did know that Stan Barstow was the author of books called A Kind Of Loving and A Raging Calm. That’s because they were both listed as further titles in the Hutchinson […]

Drunkard’s Walk

I watched some old films. What they all had in common, apart from being set in London, was that their central characters were men acting out desperate plans, intoxicated either on substances or their own past or dreams for the future. Their lives are tense and claustrophobic even when they aren’t trapped in single rooms […]

Small Towns In Germany

I read Dark Satellites by Clemens Meyer. This is a collection of 12 short stories, divided in to 3 parts each with a page-long shorter piece at the start of each part. There are no common characters or connected places, though the title of the book appears in more than one place. With the exception […]

Shock Beat Jazz

This week I’ve been listening to the new Stereolab compilation, Electronically Possessed [Switched On Vol.4]. As we all know, Stereolab represent the highest development of music under capitalism before society transforms to technocommunism, where we will live in floating sky-cities and listen to telepathic salsa symphonies composed democratically from the mass consciousness. This collects many […]