The Second Sex (book review)
Reading this now, in 2025, was like visiting a site where something astonishing was built some 75 years ago, something that goes on challenging readers even as the terms of that challenge shift and...
Category: writing
Disappearing Writer
This morning I read an AI-generated review of my own writing. It was of an academic article[1] from 2010, about the photomontage artist John Heartfield (1891-1968). The notification and link came from academia.edu, a...
Eros the Bittersweet: Book Review
It’s the sort of literary criticism that expands a language, in some sense “rewrites” the text or group of texts under consideration. Reading and translating ancient texts for evidence of a specific experience, namely...
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,...