For readers and thinkers on whom nothing is lost
For readers and thinkers on whom nothing is lost
I recently saw Richard Dawkins on his final public speaking tour. And while I was not able to ask him a question then, one still burns brightly in my mind – concerning memes, and the rise of AI in culture. In lieu of the professor himself, I explore my question here, in hopes of finding a satisfactory answer.
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George Gissing’s ‘New Grub Street’ is a fascinating work about the life of several writers in the cut-throat journalism industry of Victorian England. Here, I take a look at the startling heroics of one character, whose admirable moment of fearlessness questions everything he had stood for up to that point.
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With the most contentious US presidential election in my lifetime fast approaching, America feels more fragmented than ever. I consider whether a cause of the land of the free’s disunity problem lies within the country’s founding myth.
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Northrop Frye’s ‘Anatomy of Criticism’ is a momentous collection of essays that I have been grappling with for a while now, as I try to foray further into the folds of literary criticism. Here, I return to just its first few pages, and consider Frye’s point about the danger of the public intellectual and the ‘history of taste’.
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I must admit, I find myself somewhat uninspired this time of year. In search of a remedy, I turn to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’, to see if an answer lies within the icy wastes of his South Pole.
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As a fan of the Hunger Games series, I was pleased to find that Suzanne Collins has reached a similar level of quality with ‘The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’. As an English graduate, I was not expecting to find in the book a relationship to the Romantic poets substantial enough to sink my teeth into. Here, I do exactly that— I consider the true significance of the fraught relationship between Coriolanus Snow and Lucy Gray Baird, a journey that will take us via Rousseau, Hobbes and Wordsworth.
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A few scribblings ago, I wrote about a quote by David Hockney stating that ‘Space is where God lives’ in a painting, and applied that philosophy of valuing absence to writing as well. Now, I’d like to turn that same idea to cinema, and wonder whether the huge production values of modern film are actually a detriment to the experience of the viewer.
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Dostoevsky’s final work is also the culmination of his artistic endeavour, laying bare the entire scope of the human condition over the course of almost one thousand pages. I have recently finished this masterwork, and now attempt to organise some of my thoughts about its message.
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“Space is where God lives.” This quote from British artist David Hockney originally applied to the art of painting, but I consider its pertinence to the art of writing, as well. From the sparsity of 20th century minimalism to the richness of the Victorian realists, all authors must consider the importance not just of their words, but of the blank space between them.
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‘La Belle Dame’ is one of Keats’ most enigmatic of poems, detailing the love and loss of a certain ‘Knight at arms’ the nature of which we are never properly told. But beyond the individual pining of a man over his lost ‘Lady in the Meads’, is there a wider truth that Keats is trying to tell, concerning the direction of literature and the fate of his fellow Romantics as a whole?
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