The Spell of the Sensuous: Book Review
This book seems like “mine,” in a sense few ever turn out to be. That’s because it recognizes the difference between spoken and written language. It’s a subject of very long-term interest to me....
The Years: Book Review
It’s as if I’ve just read my own biography. I haven’t, of course: The Years is clearly ordered and clearly labelled as Ernaux’s autobiography, or memoire, from the date of her birth in 1941...
The Empusium: a Health Resort Horror Story (Book Review)
I finished reading a few days ago, and can still feel my admiration building. In many ways traditional in structure, it is a tale of a character transformation, from the point a young man...
Training robots?
LinkedIn advertises quite a few job opportunities in the “AI training” area. Please, fellow writers, don’t squander your hard-earned human skill on robots! Writing is a way for humans to discover, invent and evolve,...
Luigi Ghirri: The Complete Essays 1973-1991. Book Review
I had already read a few of these essays when I realised that no one would try to persuade me that photography “records” or “represents” reality. A reader is credited from the start, that...
The Domestication of the Savage Mind: Book Review
I didn’t like the title very much, but understand, in retrospect, the intended irony: it expresses the kind of thinking Goody does his best to discredit, an old, ugly pattern encoded in the terms...