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Index: Principal Articles

The e-Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.

Monday, 17 September 2012

Alana Shilling: ‘Digitization only multiplies possibilities and begs questions that have yet to fully emerge from dusky uncertainty. Before predicting that technology would create a “global village,” Marshall McLuhan wondered how medium determined content. When the physical presence of a book is replaced with a digital version, how does that impact our thought processes, our understanding of what we read and how we read it?’

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A calendar for Mars.

Wednesday, 22 August 2012

Rev George Lardas: ‘I do not purpose to use this calendar to the exclusion of all others, but rather we offer this as a reasonable and practical proposal for timekeeping on Mars for astronomical and astronau­tical use. I believe that the regularity of construction, the uninterrupted sequence of weekdays, the use of the same calendar for every month of a year, the use of familiar and easy to remember names for time divisions, the maintenance of the vernal equinox on the same calendar day for a long span of years, the year count starting with a universally accepted astronomical reference point, and the result that it encompasses all observations of Mars both historical and current, all constitute virtues that strongly commend this proposal.’

Also filed in Science, Medicine & Technology | Tagged | Comments (2)

Newton’s prisms.

Sunday, 22 July 2012

Alan Wall: “The ‘truth’ of any fact is its demonstrability within a system of representations. No fact is ever singular, or discrete; it is relational. ‘There are no things,’ said the painter Georges Braque, ‘only relations between things.’ Nothing is inherently true or false. It appears in a field of relations out of which truth or falsehood is generated. To stand outside any representational world and describe it is to designate it either as myth, ideology or bad science.”

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An Englishman at the first modern Olympics, 1896.

Sunday, 8 July 2012

G. S. Robertson: ‘Who, who was present there, does not wish that he may once again be permitted to behold it? After the ode had been recited and the olive-branches presented, everyone’s first desire must have been for a repetition of the whole. The feeling of absolute entrancement with the beauty of the sight, the rapture of sensation, and the joy of recollection, which overmastered all who shared in this spectacle, found vent in ardent wishes that the Olympian games should be reserved to dignify Athens and to be glorified by her glory.’

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Events, History & Travel, Sport & Fashion | Tagged | Comments (0)

On Sculpture.

Monday, 2 July 2012

Anthony O’Hear: I suppose, in most sculpture there will be several final causes, several purposes for which the work is done; but as human work, it will have always have some final causality, and in having it, a sculptural object will be distinguished from a purely natural stone, however similar the two might be in appearance. A whole host of other questions, about form and meaning, will then come into play in determining our response to the sculptural object.

Also filed in Art & Architecture, Psychology, Philosophy & Education | Tagged | Comments (0)

Dramatising Mrs Dalloway.

Monday, 25 June 2012

Michelene Wandor: One must engage with the rhythms and the style of the original, so that the dramatising process remains faithful to these, as well as to the more obvious issues of story, etc. The consummate dramatiser is also a consummate critical reader, for whom part of the dramatisation is the challenge of including not only elements within the prose, but also, in a sense, re-reading the imperfections, the contradictions, the lacunae, even, in the text. This is essential because, of course, one is reading from the present, with one’s critical insights, whatever they are.

Also filed in Broadcasting, Dance & Performance, Film, Television, Video & Theatre, Poetry & Fiction | Tagged | Comments (0)

Literature in the other Jubilee year.

Tuesday, 5 June 2012

H. D. Traill: One has resolutely to think away all the brass bands and banners, as of a Salvation Army procession, which confuse and vulgarise the advance of English literature, before we can discern the truth which fortunately is at bottom indisputable, that during the Sixty Years of the Queen’s reign that advance has been real and great.

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The Faustian impulse and European exploration.

Tuesday, 5 June 2012

Ricardo Duchesne: Europeans were not only exceptional in their literary endeavors, but also in their agonistic and expansionist behaviors. Their great books, including their liberal values, were themselves inseparably connected to their aristocratic ethos of competitive individualism. There is no need to concede to multicultural critics, as Norman Davies does, “the sorry catalogue of wars, conflict, and persecutions that have dogged every stage of the [Western] tale.” The expansionist dispositions of Europeans as well as their literary and other achievements were similarly driven by an aggressive and individually felt desire for superlative and undemocratic recognition.

Also filed in History & Travel | Tagged | Comments (11)

The Janus Face of Metaphor.

Tuesday, 8 May 2012

Alan Wall: Rid language of metaphor and it falls apart. In fact, it is impossible to speak without metaphor. Even if we trained ourselves to avoid figures of speech altogether, catachresis inhabits the lexicon: our etymologies constitute a riot of metaphoric transfer.

Also filed in Alan Wall Essays, Clues & Labyrinths, The Fortnightly Review of Books | Tagged | Comments (0)

Story of a song.

Monday, 30 April 2012

Anthony Howell: I hugely appreciate the way Marianne Faithfull has re-invented herself, a process that began with ‘Broken English’. This album is a milestone in UK music history. Every track is a revelation; she really comes into her own as a songwriter, and even to the cover versions of songs such as Working Class Hero she imparts a sort of heroism. The voice is no longer the wistful voice of the sixties singer; instead it has a smoky depth, a husky edge that conveys raw emotion.

Also filed in Dance & Performance, Music and Photography | Tagged | Comments (5)

Can Creative Writing really be taught in British universities?

Sunday, 22 April 2012

Michelene Wandor: Writer-teachers are not being paid to write, but, rather, to teach. Their imaginative output (poetry, drama, prose) is now called ‘research’, within the academy, while still being deemed ‘literature’ outside it. It’s an issue which CW avoids

Also filed in Psychology, Philosophy & Education | Tagged | Comments (0)

Poetry Prize Culture and the Aberdeen Angus.

Sunday, 22 April 2012

Peter Riley: ‘The judging criteria, being tied to a system of familiarity and recurrence, are inevitably subjective and inevitably self-propagating. What chance is there of objectivity in an art where there is no common agreement as to what constitutes its qualities?

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Poetry & Fiction, Poetry Notes | Tagged | Comments (7)

Clues and labyrinths.

Saturday, 17 March 2012

Alan Wall: The labyrinth is the site of a crime instituted by desire. It was Pasiphae who loved the bull. Minos in his grief had the labyrinth built by Daedalus to hide from the light of day the fearsome creature who had come out of the king’s wife’s loins. So the labyrinth is a monument to love, built at one remove; the superego is erasing the traces the libido has left. We push the things of light into the darkness.

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Understanding life backwards.

Saturday, 10 March 2012

Alan Macfarlane: The world of the British Empire and my up-bringing will no doubt strike most people, whether in Africa, South America or China, as extraordinary even now. It is likely that in another century it will seem a magical and different world even to the British. My own childhood nearly sixty years ago is starting to take on a magical unreality – a foreign country where they do different things for different reasons. If that is so for me, how much more will it be for my great grandchildren or my friends from China or Japan?

Also filed in Biography, Memoir and Autobiographical Prose, History & Travel | Tagged | Comments (0)

Joseph de Maistre’s ‘different sort of progress’.

Saturday, 25 February 2012

Anthony O’Hear: There is one respect in which Maistre might himself be too much a figure of his own age: he is as much a believer in progress as his Enlightenment opponents. It is just a different sort of progress.

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Notes & Comment, Psychology, Philosophy & Education, The Fortnightly Review of Books | Tagged | Comments (1)
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