[for the Telegraph, 3/3/18]
This is a genre that hangs on blanks and lacunae, the things that people don’t yet know. (If Philip Marlowe could just interview God, Chandler novels would be short.) In that sense, they’re stories of trying to listen: the investigator strains to pick out a clue, match his account to hers, track down a dingy address based on a name half-heard in a bar.
[for Apollo, 1/3/18]
McCall admits that there’s a ‘social’ element to his light works. Their space is never entirely dark, even outside the membranes, because the sheets give off a silvery glow.
[for the Telegraph, 24/2/18]
Vlautin thinks in B-roll footage: broad sighing vistas of the Nevadan hills, wild horses bathing in the sun, pinyon pine and birch trees and creeks that trickle along. That characters have to live here, punctuating nature with their mess of cause and effect, seems like an imposition.
[for GARAGE, 14/2/18]
We learn about ourselves by looking at others. It takes the radical inauthenticity of the fashion world to remind us of that.
[for the TLS, 8/2/18]
Bill Knott was a learned man. Introducing his selected poems, I Am Flying Into Myself, his editor Thomas Lux claims that he “had read all of English and American poetry . . . twice”.
[for Apollo, 19/1/18]
During the opening night, the audience saw his efforts in the flesh. Gabie walked over to a giant block of chalk, which had an axe tucked underneath it; he took up the axe, and hewed an edge from the chalk; then he hefted the chalk, moved towards an empty black wall, and began to scrape backwards and forwards from left to right.
[for GARAGE, 23/1/18]
Del Rey was born for the Bomb. Her voice is languorous and slow; her lyrics make emotion all too obvious. Everything’s so elegantly shaped and irresponsible that it challenges you to stay invested.
[for the LRB Blog, 27/12/17]
For two hours, I was the only person there. The weather was overcast, and not warm. The Thames looked drab, as it often does.
[for Apollo, 13/12/17]
For every Ernö Goldfinger, there was an Alison Smithson. It was the latter who coined the phrase ‘frisson of the togetherness’, when she was talking in 1989 about fashionable kids. You couldn’t atomise their style, she said; you couldn’t treat it item-by-item.
[for White Noise, 8/11/17]
At the match I attended in 2015, everything looked pleasantly wonky; during half-time, we could buy only one kind of beer and one kind of pie. This was the kind that came, inauspiciously, shrink-wrapped in a photo of a much better pie.
[for the Guardian, 23/8/17]
Madness Is Better than Defeat may be stylish but it’s long, too, and its relentless flamboyance left me a little cold. I felt as though applause was expected at all the best lines, but would have appreciated a bit of unflashy immersion in what the lines collectively make.
[for the CHR, 7/6/17]
To listen to Greif’s proliferating ‘I’, turning and turning upon itself, is to receive the impression of a performance not of the self, but for it: an eerily sterile puppet-show, where the essayist can balance ‘I feel something’ with ‘or I don’t feel something’ while the world is screaming and burning on the screen before him.
[for minor literature[s], 10/4/17]
Unfolding slowly and disdaining its notional plot, The Combinations comes to read like a distended roundelay. This is the novel as both dance and farce. Sixty-four chapters, plus an overture, and an intermission, and a coda – each ‘an image from a film, but you can’t remember which one’.
[for the Guardian, 1/4/17]
“What’s a sentence, really, if not time spent alone?” The kind of storyteller who says this won’t take an audience for granted; their phrase, in the pun on “sentence”, weaves expression and imprisonment into each other.
