Tony Judt was an eminent historian. He wrote acclaimed books, he wrote for the New York Review of Books, he was a university professor. He was an intellectual, but in the best possible sense of the word. He was a public intellectual. In 2008, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehig’s Disease. By October 2009 he was paralysed from the neck down. He died in August last year. Read the rest of this entry »
I have gone through a number of comic book phases in my life. Growing up, like most kids, I loved comic books. I’d read whatever I could get my hands on, from Roy of the Rovers to 2000AD to Spiderman. I’d try and draw my own comics, with varying degrees of success. And periodically that interest has resurfaced. Read the rest of this entry »
A new exhibition of the photographer Francesca Woodman has opened at the Victoria Miro gallery in London. I first saw Woodman’s work at the Tate Modern a few years ago and it has stayed with me ever since. Her photographs are mostly black and white, in an empty room often inhabited by a single figure. They are beautiful images in their own right, but there is also a whole lot more going on under the surface. Read the rest of this entry »
Upon asking the question, “What do you do, then?” surely the most chilling words us bloggers can hear are:
“I’m a writer.”
This is not going to end well. If they genuinely are, we are consumed by a combination of admiration and envy. If it turns out they write blurbs for catalogues or other such hackery, then we are beyond annoyed.
After all, we write. We write regularly, on all manner of subjects. And we care about what we write.
But does that make us writers? Read the rest of this entry »
Wait until next year 