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Brown Goo like Marmite

Neal Ascherson: Memories of the Fog, 8 October 2015

London Fog: The Biography 
by Christine Corton.
Harvard, 408 pp., £22.95, November 2015, 978 0 674 08835 1
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... to the streets of London, this time walking with their flares in front of motor cars. As T.S. Eliot evoked ‘the brown fog of a winter dawn’ in The Waste Land, a Committee for the Investigation of Atmospheric Pollution insisted that two-thirds of the problem came from domestic fireplaces.New instruments recorded 340,000 pieces of soot in every cubic ...

Red makes wrong

Mark Ford: Harry Mathews, 20 March 2003

The Human Country: New and Collected Stories 
by Harry Mathews.
Dalkey Archive, 186 pp., £10.99, October 2002, 1 56478 321 9
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The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Collected Essays 
by Harry Mathews.
Dalkey Archive, 290 pp., £10.99, April 2003, 1 56478 288 3
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... antithetical terms. ‘The Dialect of the Tribe’ (a phrase of Mallarmé’s appropriated by T.S. Eliot in ‘Little Gidding’) takes the form of an academic article in which an unnamed professor discusses a small New Guinea tribe whose peculiar language has no content, but instead somehow enacts the process of translation. Every Pagolak sentence embodies ...

It knows

Daniel Soar: You can’t get away from Google, 6 October 2011

The Googlisation of Everything (and Why We Should Worry) 
by Siva Vaidhyanathan.
California, 265 pp., £18.95, March 2011, 978 0 520 25882 2
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In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives 
by Steven Levy.
Simon and Schuster, 424 pp., £18.99, May 2011, 978 1 4165 9658 5
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I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 
by Douglas Edwards.
Allen Lane, 416 pp., £20, July 2011, 978 1 84614 512 4
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... are what Google sells to advertisers.’ Vaidhyanathan, who likes alliteration but isn’t so big on facts, doesn’t explain what he means by ‘sells’ (or whether ‘to sell a fancy’ could mean anything at all), but if he’s implying that Google makes the information it has about us available to advertisers then he’s wrong. It isn’t ...

Use Use Use

Robert Baird: Robert Duncan’s Dream, 24 October 2013

Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus 
by Lisa Jarnot.
California, 509 pp., £27.95, August 2013, 978 0 520 23416 1
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... his own devising. He distinguished himself among the crowd at Nin’s apartment by volunteering to test the anatomical plausibility of the dirty stories they were assembling for an anonymous benefactor. He was an insatiable seducer, and a bold one too: one night after dinner with Kael and her boyfriend, Duncan cornered the boyfriend and flashed his erection ...

Born to Lying

Theo Tait: Le Carré, 3 December 2015

John le Carré: The Biography 
by Adam Sisman.
Bloomsbury, 652 pp., £25, October 2015, 978 1 4088 2792 5
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... read’. It took the genre into what the paranoid CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton, citing T.S. Eliot, called ‘a wilderness of mirrors’, and topped bestseller lists in Britain and America. Cornwell described his sudden success as ‘like being in a car crash’. He resigned from MI6 in 1964. Once again, the exact sequence of events is unclear, but he ...

In Some Sense True

Tim Parks: Coetzee, 21 January 2016

The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy 
by J.M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz.
Harvill Secker, 198 pp., £16.99, May 2015, 978 1 84655 888 7
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J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time 
by David Attwell.
Oxford, 272 pp., £19.99, September 2015, 978 0 19 874633 1
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... of starting with the personal, topical and perhaps autobiographical, then working towards a T.S. Eliot-like ‘impersonality’ through repeated rewriting and editing. Coetzee was drawn to ‘impersonality’, Attwell remarks, ‘because it suited his personality’ – a curious formulation. But ‘impersonality is not what it seems. It is not a simple ...

It’s she, it’s she, it’s she

Joanna Biggs: Americans in Paris, 2 August 2012

Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis 
by Alice Kaplan.
Chicago, 289 pp., £17, May 2012, 978 0 226 42438 5
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As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Diaries 1964-80 
by Susan Sontag.
Hamish Hamilton, 544 pp., £18.99, April 2012, 978 0 241 14517 3
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... by asking her if she’d read it. Sontag had, many times, and the reward for passing this test of a pick-up line was an introduction to San Francisco’s gay scene. Nightwood showed Sontag ‘the way I want to write – rich and rhythmic – heavy, sonorous prose’, but also how to live, as she and her new friends laughed about ‘what a parody of ...

Professor or Pinhead

Stephanie Burt: Anne Carson, 14 July 2011

Nox 
by Anne Carson.
New Directions, 192 pp., £19.99, April 2010, 978 0 8112 1870 2
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... as well by 2001, when The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos won the T.S. Eliot Prize. A memorial to Carson’s late brother, Michael, Nox has found as much attention, and as much praise, as any book by any poet in the past couple of years. The praise is disturbing, sometimes wrongheaded, and reflects a category mistake; it also makes ...

The Authentic Snarl

Blake Morrison: The Impudence of Tony Harrison, 30 November 2017

The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966-2016 
by Tony Harrison, edited by Edith Hall.
Faber, 544 pp., £25, April 2017, 978 0 571 32503 0
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Collected Poems 
by Tony Harrison.
Penguin, 464 pp., £9.99, April 2016, 978 0 241 97435 3
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... the Olivier stage seemed an ideal space for verse drama: not the sort associated with T.S. Eliot, ‘so discreet and well bred in its metrical gentility you wondered why it bothered to go public at all,’ but something more akin to music hall or panto, with ‘a vernacular energy to crackle across the footlights and engage an audience’. Ibsen ...

Wild Resistance

Owen Hatherley: Adorno's Aesthetics, 6 June 2024

Without Model: Parva Aesthetica 
by Theodor Adorno, translated by Wieland Hoban.
Seagull, 177 pp., £19.99, June 2023, 978 1 80309 218 8
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... it in his counterweight, Adorno for Revolutionaries (2011), Adorno as ‘a kind of German T.S. Eliot without the practical cats’.Adorno’s aesthetics are extreme. ‘He is an easy man to caricature,’ Watson writes, ‘because he believed in exaggeration as a means of telling the truth.’ But he was no misanthrope. A melancholic, certainly, but also a ...

His Own Sort of Outsider

Philip Clark: Tippett’s Knack, 16 July 2020

Michael Tippett: The Biography 
by Oliver Soden.
Weidenfeld, 750 pp., £25, April 2019, 978 1 4746 0602 8
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... cook, parlourmaid and governess, but Isabel made sure her boys were aware that others weren’t so fortunate. During trips to London, Michael and his brother, Peter, helped serve food in East End soup kitchens and were taken along to suffragist meetings. Tippett attended his first orchestral concert at this time: Henry Wood conducting music by Tchaikovsky ...

Kipling’s Lightning-Flash

Barbara Everett, 10 January 1991

... have as much to do with Somerset Maugham (whom they must have helped to invent) as with T.S. Eliot. But there is a curious quality in these early stories which throws some light on the writer’s originality during the 1890s. I want to illustrate this quality, somewhat Irishly, from another and litter collection, because one story there reveals it ...

Kermode’s Changing Times

P.N. Furbank, 7 March 1991

The Uses of Error 
by Frank Kermode.
Collins, 432 pp., £18, February 1991, 9780002154659
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... the forbidding notice ‘No through road to action’, and he contested the idea, implicit in Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’, that to embrace Donne you had to give up Milton. It was a stage in which, not for the last time, Kermode offered himself as a reconciler and peacemaker. Romantic Image, moreover, in the way it pursued a certain ...

Outside the text

Marilyn Butler, 19 December 1985

The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory 
by Jerome McGann.
Oxford, 352 pp., £19.50, May 1985, 0 19 811730 2
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The Politics of Language: 1791-1819 
by Olivia Smith.
Oxford, 269 pp., £19.50, December 1984, 0 19 812817 7
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... what in vulgar language is nonprofessional or simply human. More than sixty years ago T.S. Eliot uttered his classic dictum barring amateurs: ‘we must consider poetry primarily as poetry and not another thing.’ When in the Sixties and Seventies Barthes, Derrida and others declared the poem to be an autonomous system of verbal signs, they were ...

Impossible Wishes

Michael Wood: Thomas Mann, 6 February 2003

The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann 
edited by Ritchie Robertson.
Cambridge, 257 pp., £45.50, November 2001, 9780521653107
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Thomas Mann: A Biography 
by Hermann Kurzke, translated by Leslie Willson.
Allen Lane, 582 pp., £30, January 2002, 0 7139 9500 9
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... transfiguration of it. Quite unwittingly Adrian is offering a sophisticated analogue of what T.S. Eliot had to say about Ulysses: that the novel as a form could no longer model its order on a world which had lost all sense of order. No wonder Mann was so taken by the connection. But where Joyce, according to Eliot, answered ...

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