Whatever slows it down
OK, if you insist that COVID-19 is just like the flu, I could agree if you dropped “just.” It’s like the flu, sort of – but much deadlier and, in all likelihood, more contagious. I’ve seen the COVID-19 mortality rate…
Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
OK, if you insist that COVID-19 is just like the flu, I could agree if you dropped “just.” It’s like the flu, sort of – but much deadlier and, in all likelihood, more contagious. I’ve seen the COVID-19 mortality rate…
Philip Hensher – the novelist and librettist unless a namesake – responds to James Butler‘s piece in the London Review of Books: Butler echoes the claim… that ‘there is also little doubt that four years of unrelenting attacks on the…
Christopher Bray on Louis Althusser: …[S]ince in French “Louis” is pronounced exactly the same as the word for “he”, he had never thought of himself as an individual proper. Not exactly: the diphthongs in lui and Louis are supposed to…
Jonathan Gaisman writes of Verklärte Nacht, Schoenberg’s early work (1899) based on a poem by Richard Dehmel: Looking at the poem on its purely literary merits, it is indeed difficult not to wince, or, at the mention of the man…
Roland Dyens (1955-2016) was a “great and incomparable French guitarist, composer, and arranger,” one of the most important guitarists around the world, due to his interpretations, his compositions, and especially his vision of the instrument and of music overall. He…
Dominic Green writes in The Critic: No one seems to have noticed, but the fortieth anniversary of Rock’s death is upon us. You can pick a personal “day the music died”… Sentimentalists might pick the release of the Ramones’ collaboration…
The Guardian reports from Rio de Janeiro and Maranhão: From raperos to roqueiros, a growing chorus of musicians are denouncing the extremist politician [Bolsonaro] and his assault on their trade. Roqueiros broadly means rock musicians. Raperos refers to rappers, obviously,…
La Fontaine’s fox, the connoisseur of grapes, was all-French, as it were – “Gascon, some say Norman” – and in keeping with his roots, he preferred wisecracking to whining, which his creator appreciated. American shale oil, sweet as a rule,…
Phil Christman writes in The Hedgehog Review: Some bad movies… reveal through sheer lack of self-awareness the incoherencies and solecisms of the culture that produces them. These sorts of movies fascinate me in the way a too-honest idiot does, after…
There’s more in the Guardian piece on Brazilian flat earthers that I quoted in the previous post: …Olavo de Carvalho – a former astrologer who is considered the intellectual guru of Bolsonaro and his inner circle – prompted outrage and…
Sam Cowie reports from São Paolo for The Guardian: Siddhartha Chaibub’s suspicions that the Earth wasn’t really round were first aroused when he stumbled across a YouTube video while living in Brazil’s capital, Brasília… “The model that is imposed on…
In the London Review of Books, John Lanchester reviews The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet by James Griffiths and We Have Been Harmonised: Life in China’s Surveillance State by Kai…