reading and writing | Wait until next year

January 4, 2013

No resolution

Those of you with a WordPress blog will have no doubt received their funkily designed Annual Report cataloguing your 2012 year in blogging. For those who don’t blog, or at least don’t blog through WordPress, the report collates all the relevant data relating to blog activity and visitors and all that kind of stuff. It is a nice feature as it offers an opportunity to reflect on how you are doing with your blogging, look at what you’ve achieved in terms of how many people you’ve reached in the big, bad world and consider the sheer quantity of stuff you’ve thrown up on the internet. Read the rest of this entry »

9 Comments

November 20, 2012

A New Irony

“Take, for example, an ad that calls itself an ad, makes fun of its own format, and attempts to lure its target market to laugh at and with it. It pre-emptively acknowledges its own failure to accomplish anything meaningful. No attack can be set against it, as it has already conquered itself. The ironic frame functions as a shield against criticism. The same goes for ironic living. Irony is the most self-defensive mode, as it allows a person to dodge responsibility for his or her choices, aesthetic and otherwise. To live ironically is to hide in public. It is flagrantly indirect, a form of subterfuge, which means etymologically to “secretly flee” (subter + fuge). Somehow, directness has become unbearable to us.”

How to Live Without Irony, Christy Walpole, New York Times

“Isn’t there supposed to be an irony, some grim humor, some sense of the peculiar human insistence on seeing past the larger madness into small and skewed practicalities, into off-shaded moments that help us consider a narrow hope?”

Mao II, Don DeLillo Read the rest of this entry »

3 Comments

October 8, 2012

Striking out

Woman bowling, taken around 1950

The Art of Fielding is quite a lovely, comforting book. In many ways it was the perfect holiday read this summer. In many ways it should have been my perfect book – easy-to-read mid-brow fare, feted by the likes of Jonathan Franzen, giving some sort of insight into the human condition, and fundamentally all about baseball. And yet something was lacking, something wasn’t quite right. Read the rest of this entry »

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September 14, 2012

This week’s consumption report

That is consumption in the sense of consuming stuff, rather than suffering from tuberculosis, you’ll be pleased to hear. You may be less pleased to hear that this is a lazy link-heavy post. Anyway, this is what I’ve been consuming this week… Read the rest of this entry »

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April 19, 2012

There’s more than one way to tell a tale

This feels like one of those posts where I should really do something clever with the format, to reflect the subject matter and outline its possibilities. But I suspect that is beyond your humble correspondent’s capabilities, particularly as he tries to squeeze in a blog post in an already truncated lunch break, and oh the excuses! Anyway, let me tell you about whiteandwhite, an algorithmic noir movie. Read the rest of this entry »

Category: reading and writing