Reviews and other ponderings
Rereading the posts I make on this blog, after a week or so, is an odd experience. It’s almost as if someone else has taken something I thought and put it into words, and often bad ones. It is increasingly obvious that it is hard to have a style of one’s own. It is impossible to [...]
I wonder if a period of plenty and ease was ever correctly identified, except in retrospect. We always think that times are tough, but are hopeful that they will improve. If they do not, and, instead, deteriorate, we are appalled, and declare the now-passed time a Golden Age. We thought we were working too hard [...]
After a late night conversation about the huge number of characters in Shakespeare’s history plays, a friend sent me a tube in the post, which ended up containing what you see in the attached video. What we found interesting was how many characters remain through several plays, even though their titles change over the course [...]
When I was 18, I had the very good fortune to find a job in a theatre in Manchester. The job was basic, but at that time, the late eighties, Manchester was the most glamourous and exciting city in the world. Far away, on another continent, I had spent hours reading about the exploits of [...]
Sometime, I catch myself thinking something, and wondering what I am basing my thinking on. This happens quite rarely, given that so little of what we think we know can actually be proven. We are all guilty of holding opinions, often unconsciously, with no basis in reality, but it’s always easier to spot other people [...]
I was thinking about facebook over Christmas, because I met up with so many people for whom facebook represents just about everything useful about their computer. Among the people I know online, facebook is not very fashionable. I don’t use it, for several reasons, but chiefly because many young members of my extended family use [...]
…your brother and my sister no sooner met but they looked, no sooner looked but they loved, no sooner loved but they sighed, no sooner sighed but they asked one another the reason, no sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy; and in these degrees have they made a pair of stairs to [...]
I re-read ‘The Big Sleep’ the other day, and enjoyed it very much. I was reminded of a famous plot hole in the novel that came to light when William Faulkner was writing the screenplay. During filming, allegedly neither the director nor the screenwriters knew whether chauffeur Owen Taylor was murdered or had killed himself. [...]
Mass production has always been used as a swear word, in my experience. If something is described as mass produced, it is implied that it is cheap and nasty, and liable to fall apart at the first opportunity. The Left, in particular, always seem to have had a problem with it. We are invited to [...]
We keep getting told how publishing in undergoing its greatest transformation since Gutenberg, and perhaps it is. But our tendency to lump the whole history of publishing into one ‘pre-web’ catagory means we can forget how much it changed fairly recently. Publishing was last turned on its head in the 1980s. How it did might [...]