Tag: Literature

  • Review: The Ebony Tower by John Fowles

    Collection of five novellas from the genius that is Fowles. Stunningly brilliant, eloquent and profoundly intelligent. It is surely impossible not to learn from this man about both writing and life itself. This writer took literature towards a new frontier. Amazing.

  • Review: The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory

    There is something deeply comforting about an epic novel you can immerse yourself into such as this. This window into Henry VIII’s court has been meticulously studied and rings very true. The Boleyn girls are particularly well drawn. This is history dramatized respectably, with its subjects given depth, life and credible motivations. It may not […]

  • 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, […]

  • Jane Eyre, as by Irvine Welsh, by Me

    There wis no possibility ay taking a walk thit day. It were pissin wi rain thit further outdoor bummin aroond wis now oot ay the fuckin question. Ah wis glad ay it: Ah nivir liked long walks, especially in the fuckin cold: dreadful tae me wis the coming home in the raw twilight, wi frozen […]

  • On writing

    From a mail I sent a while ago: You know, I know quite a few writers who can’t write. I don’t mean people who want to write, or people who’d like to be writers. I don’t mean those that just think they are, or are willing but unable. (That ten to the dozen.) I mean, […]

  • A Dream Within a Dream

    Take this kiss upon the brow! And, in parting from you now, Thus much let me avow- You are not wrong, who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? […]

  • Icelandic Proverb

    Vin sínum skal maður vinur vera, þeim og þess vin. En óvinar síns skyli engi maður vinar vinur vera. To his friend a man a friend shall prove, To him and the friend of his friend; But never a man shall friendship make With one of his foeman’s friends.

  • Philip Roth: The writer as a perennial apprentice

    Philip Roth, regarded as America’s greatest living novelist, on writing: ‘You’re always lost at the beginning. You may be so lost you don’t even know what you’re going to write about. But even when you discover what you’re going to write about, you don’t know how you’re going to go about writing it. The sentences […]

  • Foucault: The History of Sexuality

    For a long time, the story goes, we supported a Victorian regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today. Thus the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our restrained, mute, and hypocritical sexuality. At the beginning of the seventeenth century a certain frankness was still common, it would seem. Sexual […]

  • Review: Mirror, Mirror by Gregory Maguire

    I have just finished reading Gregory Maguire’s Mirror, Mirror, which is a retelling of the Snow White myth set around C15 Italy. Maguire interweaves the myth with historical fact which largely gives the story a fresh sense of realism not generally associated with fairytales. Indeed, Maguire paints such a vivid world that the mythical elements […]