Bad Moon Rising

This year sees one minor literary anniversary which deserves more attention: February 24th 2023 will be 40 years since the first publication of The Washington Square Ensemble by Madison Smartt Bell. The original US edition’s cover art had the main characters’ names scrawled on a wall, to mark that this was a novel set in […]

The Strange Idol’s Pattern

Like millions of other British people, I’ve been listening to the brand new album Pop-Up! Ker- Ching! And The Possibilities Of Modern Shopping by Mozart Estate. This is of course the record that says everything about everything in post-Truss Britain, from the perspective of a man who knows a great deal about 50 years of […]

Netscape Navigators

I went to 2 new things at Whitechapel Gallery. First, the new exhibition The House Of Le Bas. Second was the launch event for Cyberfeminism Index, edited by Mindy Seu. Please use the links as I did go to the bother of finding them for you. Seetal Solanki couldn’t make it, but otherwise the Zilkha […]

Abstract Objections

I went to some places. First, at the Stolen Space gallery on Osborn Street, there is Portraying Portraiture: Also Emerge, by Sabek: Over to the Whitechapel Gallery for Action, Gesture, Performance: Feminism, the Body and Abstraction. Carolee Schneemann recently had her own retrospective at the Barbican. A video of one of her performances was the […]

Hard Chrome Finish

I’ve just read the new Paul Auster book Bloodbath Nation. This is not a novel but a short work of non-fiction, meditating on the topics around American gun ownership, mass shootings, and the politics of “gun control”. It is stated in the final pages that “I write these words today, seven months after Trump’s departure […]

Rebellious Vortex

I went to see the Helen Saunders exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery. On the first floor, next door to the Medieval and Early Renaissance selection. Here are some of those: And so on to Helen. The site also mentions the work to uncover Saunders’s work literally painted over by Lewis’s “Praxitella” (1921). By 1929 Lewis […]

Recusants

45 years ago the BBC showed an adaptation of A Traveller In Time in 5 episodes. This was intended for children, as the original book by Alison Uttley was for children. I have a very vague memory of seeing a little of the TV version when broadcast. My primary school library also had an old […]