It was all worth it. Not that reading Miéville was ever a chore, on the contrary, it has been at the very least fun and enjoyable, and more often than not horizon-expanding. Perdido was great, dark, its creatures, world, races, awe-inspiring, but never quite gripped me, nothing like The Scar, a grand adventure that had…
The opening chapters of Disgrace infuriated me. There, our protagonist David Lurie, 52, was demoted from his tenured professorship in Classics and Modern Languages as the department closed and is now adjunct professor of Communications at Cape Technical University in Cape Town. While the novel is set in the late 90’s South Africa post-apartheid, its…
It was hatred at first sight. The moment the professor spotted Jake during the dean’s induction speech, he was utterly consumed by antipathy. Why he should have felt this way when the student was but one harmless face lost in a sea of freshmen, he never knew. That ominous feeling, however, never left him. He…
Joy and warmth suffuse my every pore during this rare sunny moment on a 26th of December, behind the glass window of my aunt and uncle’s chalet in the French Alps, as I linger on a couple awe-inspiring pages. Serenity. Here I can feel that things might just be all right, that they will be….
Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic?… Well, think about it. Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience. East of Eden and the Ghost of a Friend This quote has lived rent-free in my head since I first read it…
Ok, here’s the thing. I don’t know much. This is my attempt to figure things out, to reevaluate where I’m at and how I feel about the following question. How can you consume (art) ethically under late capitalism? Because, yeah, that system informs our every thought and action. Sure. Something we all have to come…
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Only three weeks left on Olu’s student visa before he has to leave Germany. None of our German colleagues at the English Theatre Frankfurt are available, so my shoddy B2/C1 level is the best we can do to call the immigration office and hopefully figure out another way for him to stay in the country…
Maybe it’s the sleek minimalist black and white cover, maybe it’s the Deep One xenomorph occupying alone the back and front of the case, with merely ‘CHTULHU’ in smushed ink font on the spine, the neat little built-in die case. I’m just a sucker for aesthetics and they got me. In November 2021, Elder Craft…
The White Whale had been ubiquitous in my life long before I first set sight on It. If my grandfather’s focus was more on ancient Greek, latin, francophone and romance languages literature, he did transmit an absolute reverence for “the classics”. Aesop and Homer, both Pliny, Balzac, Hugo, Cervantes and Dante were his pantheon, and…