J G Ballard on viewing Crivelli’s Annunciation
Via Bibliokept: I am sure that a large part of the enduring mystery of the Renaissance masterpieces in the National Gallery was due to the absence of the explanatory matter that…
Category: writing
Jarod Gott on Tinder, writing and the presentation of the self
Recently I was at Dreams, Hallucinations and the Imagination, a conference organised by the University of Glasgow’s Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience. Dreams and like experiences are an interest…
John Ayliff – “Is Thomas the Tank Engine hard science fiction?”
A 2015 blog post by John Ayliff observes: The early Railway stories were based on real railway incidents, and the characters were based on real models of locomotive (Thomas is…
#AshWednesday with Evelyn Waugh in New Orleans, 1949
Via the Evelyn Waugh Society online I came across this from Waugh in 1949. It captures the falseness of the dichotomy betweent the fleshy pleasure of Mardi Gras and the…
The lost worlds of Debois and Julieta Guipeal at the Tipperary County Museum
This is Portrait of a Man, by Julieta Guipeal: Apologies for the photo quality – this was taken with my phone’s camera in a well-lit (and thereby reflective) space. It…
Ian Parker in The New Yorker on Dan Mallory’s life of deception
There’s an enthralling piece in the Feb 11th New Yorker on the suspense novelist Dan Mallory who has published as A J Finn. Turns out he chose a pseudonym for…
Happy Birthday Edgar Allan Poe, and a cheers to the Poe Toaster
Poe would be 210 if he was alive today, which would be a surprising development for all concerned. And presumably today will see the appearance of the Poe Toaster at Poe’s Baltimore…
Review of “Homesickness: An American History” by Susan Matt, Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, 2012
This is a wonderful book I heartily recommend, indeed re-reading the review I hope the warmth of my recommendation is clear. The balance Susan Mat strikes between mastery of the…
Séamus Sweeney 