Truthfully, indifference can often settle itself into the brain of one who reads plentifully. Even ostensibly ‘great’ literature can fail to announce itself beyond a recognition that it is expertly constructed, and that it contains all of the correct literary machinery. Then there are books like ANIMALIA.
Last night, Stephen Colbert told his audience: ‘It’s only March, and 2020 has done the impossible: Made me nostalgic for 2019.’ But nobody in his audience laughed because they were all dead. Or at home. It isn’t clear at the moment, because I haven’t read the news.
It is strangely reminiscent of old episodes of The Office – when watching the breakout series Gourmet Makes (Claire Saffitz) and It’s Alive with Brad Leone, the camera people and editors are the real heroes, comically overplaying spats, zooming in on oddities happening in the background and onomatopoetically subtitling verbal glitches by the hosts.
I have the mildest of manners. But as soon as someone tilts their seat back even an inch murder becomes a priority. If a baby makes baby noises, I think of Joan Rivers (‘is there a terrorist on board? I’m willing to help’). And if there really is a terrorist on board, forget it. I would rather die than go on trying to eat a sausage out of a paper cup with a spork.
Book 1: Tokyo Ueno Station
In a world where information passes as knowledge, and association is so frequently confused with causation, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood provides a diverting, if not entirely satisfactory fantasy.
But “concentration camp” is the only possible definition of Fort Sill, a place that was used during the Second World War to cage those Americans who looked (subversively) Japanese. It had been closed as of 2014. But there is no achievement of the last administration so minor that it cannot be undone, and the camp will now open again, this time to intern children, seekers of asylum from the hysteria of gang violence in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.
Bower is on familiar territory when he gets on to the sex life of his unhappy victim: he pounces with the salacious information that Corbyn once had an affair with a member of his inner circle. Is it Dianne Abbot? Yes. Is it that one about how he brought his friends round to reveal her splayed out naked on his bed? Yes.
Machines Like Me is not a bad novel. Nor is it good, but somewhere in between. It exists in some literary limbo where the novels of Julian Barnes sulk like abandoned children.
Uniting Johnno and Spanner is a love of music – high tempo, electronic, frankly quite terrible music.
John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum | Directed by Chad Stahelski | Action | 2h 10m
It’s brutal, bloody violence. There’s no cutting away to spare the audience the detail.
On Leonardo, Kemp has produced paper after paper, book after book. But this one is different: this one is a memoir – the sum of his career, of his life’s devotion. What a shame, then, that it is so poorly written.
