Time for a bit more Potter. (Past time, in fact – my Rowling-rereading-and-reviewing schedule is way out. I blame life.)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, like its precursor, was big but not that big, a success but not yet a phenomenon. While we’re aware now of the continuing and repeated elements in successive books [...]
As a genre, fantasy has something in common with utopian fiction. Utopias begin with a challenge – Let’s say that everyone’s happy – and then set about answering the questions that challenge provokes. The interest of a utopia is precisely which questions the author believes need to be answered: is it “Who will do the [...]
Jamie:
Back in the eighties when China was inviting “foreign friends” over, mainly to teach, as a means of preparing the locals for the forthcoming golden horde of businesspeople they weren’t too scrupulous about checking credentials. There was an absolute infestation of evangelicals, often in posts at fairly prestigious universities for which they had no qualifications [...]
Go and sit upon the grass and I shall come and sit beside you…
Back in the early seventies a couple of forward-looking sixth-formers at my school booked a series of acts, with varying degrees of success; Hatfield and the North were very nearly booked at one stage, but they ended up with Keith Christmas. I [...]
24 December 2005 – 11:12 pm
There’s some good stuff from Ross McKibbin in the current LRB:
the two major parties fundamentally share the same ideology. Despite assurances that the political elite is interested only in what works, this is the most intensely ideological period of government we have known in more than a hundred years. The model of market-managerialism has largely [...]
9 December 2005 – 12:48 am
Ellis:
Nobody I know ever buys a volume of poetry.
Me. I bought two volumes of poetry just the other week – Getting the hang of it and Singing the city, both by Colin Watts (who brought them along to a reading I attended). I can recommend both of them, despite the unfortunate fact that the city [...]
Or: of Dylan and Dylanophiles. Scorsese’s No Direction Home is glorious, although I think the BBC’s decision to show it in two halves is debatable; after Part One I was left wondering how, having got as far as 1966, they were going to fit the next 39 years of Dylan’s career into Part Two. I [...]
Ellis Sharp, whose Marxist surrealist fiction deserves better than lazy tags like ‘Marxist surrealist’, has a fascinating post here about Robert Lowell’s poem “The Fens”. It’s a short poem, so I’ll include it here:
The Fens
(After Cobbett)
From Crowland to St. Edmund’s to Ipswich
The fens are level as a drawing board:
Great bowling greens divided by a ditch [...]
To whom it may concern:
What the Attorney General said (see also the full documents linked here and Brian Barder’s two prescient commentaries)
“…at the stinking heart of what remains of the British body politic”
A catechism for the unconvinced
Adrian Mitchell told you so
