Essayists to look out for

CORP$EY

no mickey mouse ting
I spend a fair portion of my days (especially my 'working' days) reading essays on/in the LRB/New Yorker/New York Review of Books, etc.

I've discovered certain writers who I enjoy reading and I usually proceed to seek out more essays by them - but I usually discover this at random

So wondering if there are certain writers/columnists who write essays for these or other publications that you lot might hip me to?

They can be specialists or the sort of writers who can write about ANYTHING and make it compelling.
 

luka

Well-known member
when i was working with builders youd hear a lot of people regurgitate sun editorials like it was their own opinion. thick as fuck, no need to dress it up or pretend otherwise. but radio 4, the guardian, the new yorker etc work in exactly the same way. to replicate, ideology seems to big a word for something so cobbled together, but to make copies of themselves. you end up filling the world with boring people. the most boring dead ideas about life, reality, culture, politics. it's just a bit depressing. better to stay well away from these people and their essays.
 

CORP$EY

no mickey mouse ting
point taken (OTOH I don't know a single 'Guardian' reader who doesn't vocally disdain it on the daily - its readership seems to be entirely made up of people who can't stand it)

BUT

doesn't have to be an LRB/New Yorker essayist, could be MONTAIGNE or ORWELL or RICHARD LITTLEJOHN
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
They can be specialists or the sort of writers who can write about ANYTHING and make it compelling.

To bang a favourite drum of mine, can't go wrong with for compelling writing. And it really is ANYTHING: Portsmouth, typefaces, incest, sausages, Belgium, Nazis, class distinctions in fly fishing...
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Looool!

John Lanchester said:
The first talk on the first morning was titled ‘What String Theorists Can Learn from Vlad the Impaler: Narrative, Belief and the Immanence of the Imperceptible’.

Alan Sokal called...
 

luka

Well-known member
Ardkore fits only too well the model of terminal culture that Paul Virilio prophesies in The Aesthetics Of Disappearance: “a switch from the extensive time of history to the intensive time of momentariness without history”. This emergent anti-culture of instantaneity will be inhabited by a new breed of schizophrenic subject, whose ego is “made up of a series of little deaths and partial identities”.

No narrative, no destination: Ardkore is an intransitive acceleration, an intensity without object. That’s why the MC patter sounds more appropriate for a rollercoaster than music – “hold tight”, “let’s go”, “hold it down” – and why Techno is all you’ll hear at fairgrounds these days. Does this disappearance of the object of desire, this intransitive intensity, make Ardkore a culture of autistic bliss?

good essay. https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writin...-the-hardcore-continuum_1_hardcore-rave_1992_
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
that garage one really makes an impression. i was saying to luka the othr day that it gives me this very tangible sense of excitement and anticipation. he said it was his favourite in reynolds' wire series. later on ach unprompted mentioned it as being great too. i think the hardcore one's the best.
 

CORP$EY

no mickey mouse ting
I wonder just how unique Reynolds's perspective on ardkore was

In a rave of thousands how many were thinking about the Aesthetics of Disappearance?

In my head now these illegal raves were live performances by Altern8 as introduced by Giles Delueze
 

luka

Well-known member
I wonder just how unique Reynolds's perspective on ardkore was

In a rave of thousands how many were thinking about the Aesthetics of Disappearance?

In my head now these illegal raves were live performances by Altern8 as introduced by Giles Delueze

what's mad to me, and ive said it several times here before, is that he was virtually the only human with a media platform to write about it at all really, in any way. the media in this country is a joke. so parochial and proudly pig-ignorant. dumb as fuck.

things seem to swim milkily before these peoples eyes, a kind of perpetual jellied haze that occludes the vision. cotton wool in the ears. sawdust in the mouth. cull them all and start again.
 

luka

Well-known member
the 2-step one means more to me cos i read it at the time. the hardcore one only retrospectively.
 
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