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John Fowles: Mischanneling
John Fowles on the strengths of the novel vs. the screenplay: Why have I got it in for the novel? […] All the purely visual and aural sequences in the modern novel are a bore, both to read and to write. People’s physical appearance, their movements, their sounds, places, moods of places – the camera […]
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John Fowles: Choosing to Be a Writer
It would, I believe, be disingenuous to hold a class without offering the unsuited persons in the assembly a chance to leave the room. To be a writer – that is, someone for whom writing is closer to being a aspect of being rather than a particular activity, demands certain distinctions. There are many personal […]
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Student Protests and Liberal Democrats
David Mitchell Nick Clegg getting a good kicking? Could anything be more joyous? Students bring out a violent streak in me. When I see NUS spokespeople on TV talking simplistically about tuition fees, even though I basically agree with the sentiments they express so unattractively, I want to punch them. But I also like watching […]
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Cinema and Language and Shit
It’s ‘Film Thursday!’, and today’s entry pompously considers what makes a film ‘good’; and particularly how we might appraise it from a linguistic perspective. Is the quality of a film merely a matter of subjective taste, or are there characteristics of cinema which can reliably suggest its merits? I might not actually answer these questions, […]
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Victorian Punk
Picture a bunch of well-to-do art-school kids. They’re not truly excellent painters, but they basically say fuck-you to their teachers; we can paint better than any of you crusty old bastards. With supreme arrogance, they decided that the art world needed a revolution. Remarkably, they put their heads together and succeeded. This wasn’t the 1990s […]
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The ‘Pregnant Man’ and Gender
My friend just made an interesting post about the “Pregnant Man” story. ‘[It’s] complete nonsense,’ he says, ‘Beatie is not a pregnant man […] the fact that Beatie has had her breasts removed does not make her a man.’ He goes on to say that, ‘Dennis Abner is not a tiger.’ This was my reply: […]
