Latest Post

Brief Items

Saw Mike Harrison in Camden on Monday, and was advised that he’d started blogging again, but at a new address. Mike cheerfully remarked that it’d take me six hours to find it. ‘Mike Harrison Blog‘. Google is so thorough these days. Welcome back to the fold, sir. Elsewhere, the owner of a tiny island in off Scotland [...]

Featured Items

of Clockwork Men

Waterloo Bridge. London. November 1995. A man has just fallen from the parapet of the bridge into the Thames below. His name is Matthew Ogilvy, and he has come to believe that there is something dreadfully wrong with his life, and the only way he can correct it is to die. He might be right. ‘of Clockwork Men’ [...]

On Neotericity

I feel I should offer some words of explanation. No, that’s wrong. I believe I should offer some words of explanation. Better. Some of you out there have (however well meaningly and lightheartedly) observed that my use of ‘neoteric‘ positions my writing as deliberately highfalutin’, or just plain obscure, and I want to briefly, although seriously, address that. I [...]

Asides

• Is the neverending story of gameplay v narrative over? Not without an appreciation of the materiality of the playing experience, it isn't. And what Keith Stuart misses (in an otherwise concise round up of theoretical perspectives) is that there's something about the reading experience that isn't accommodated in the current popular critical field) #
• "Mr Cameron said it was "pathetic" for Mr Brown to read out quotes from novelists". Which novelists?! I accept that quoting Frederick Forsyth might be pathetic, but what if Brown starts quoting Balzac, Proust or Eco? Where will Mr Cameron's much-lauded derision of the written word be then, I wonder? #
• Katherine Hayles suggests that House of Leaves attempts to 'eat all other media'. What's the consequence, then, of a work that attempts to regurgitate the media it's absorbed? #
• Now the time has come to propose, or confront, a fundamental truth: like the being who wears it, the superhero costume is, by definition, an impossible object. It cannot exist. Link. #