Soviet Timelessness – from “Le Testament Francais”, Andrei Makhine.
From the novel also known as Dreams of My Russian Summers: I almost leaped up from my stool beside the television. For I understood so perfectly Charlotte’s reasons for being…
Category: a boredom so monumental it humbles
“a world that seeks only varieties of comfort and metaphysical appeasement.”
From the April 21 TLS, a review by Cynthia Haven of Andrezj Franaszek’s Czeslaw Miłosz biography and Miłosz’s own previously unpublished science fiction novel “The Mountains of Parnassus”: At one shattering…
Further notes on the cultural hegemony of television
I have blogged before on television’s rise, rather than fall, in recent years, to become (seemingly) the dominant cultural force. I am always struck, when logging onto twitter, to see that the…
A visual survey of the last taboo(s)
In a sensation-hungry media, exposing The Last Taboo is something of a recurrent theme. Indeed, the evident fallacy in repeatedly identifying “last” taboos does not seemingly stop journalists and subeditors reaching…
Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death 31 years on
I read quite a lot of Neil Postman about a decade ago. Always a readable and provocative voice, I must admit I take him rather less seriously since reading more…
Interview with Bret Easton Ellis, Feb 25th 1999, University Observer.
This was I suppose the high water mark of my student journalism career. How it happened was this. Ken Early, now of Second Captains and the Irish Times, was editing…
Séamus Sweeney 