Journalism - post articles/blogs, etc., here

[Leo]

Stan, please clear all the crap out of the background. no one's following what you're saying because we're all distracted by the step ladder and cleaning supplies behind you.

 

[Murphy]

Screen light on glasses adds a touch of fremen to your Trotsky

 

[Corpsey]

A writer I got into recently is Jonathan Meades, which all started when I read this article in the LRB (natch) about the Royals:

Jonathan Meades · Hatpin through the Brain: Closing Time for the Firm

They recognise the swoon in a fawner’s eye, the brisk music of a colour sergeant’s bark. They are touched by the...

www.lrb.co.uk

I read everything I could find by him in the archives, then got book of his essays and watched loads of his documentaries on YouTube.

I'm still a fan, but as with any of these (by necessity) hacks you start coming across the same opinions and turns of phrase in everything they've written and you quickly tire of their schtick.

My other 'big' find lately has been Anthony Burgess, who I haven't ready any novels (save Clockwork Orange decades ago) by but who's literary journalism (and books on Shakespeare, DH Lawrence and Joyce) is pretty fantastic.

 

[Clinamenic]

Stan, please clear all the crap out of the background. no one's following what you're saying because we're all distracted by the step ladder and cleaning supplies behind you.

Didn’t even occur to me, but you’re right.

 

[Murphy]

Meades is solid on British strangeness, yes he’s annoying (I mean Hampshire, c’mon) but over-familiarity with his yeomanry face alone isn’t advisable

 

[Corpsey]

I liked his doc on Soviet/Stalinist architecture

 

[Corpsey]

oh god I've stirred up the viper's nest

 

[Corpsey]

An entertaining tribute to drinking and smoking courtesy of the second greatest Hitchens brother

Christopher Hitchens · Booze and Fags

When the effects of drink are not extremely funny, they do have a tendency to be a bit grim. For every cheerful...

www.lrb.co.uk

 

[...]

An entertaining tribute to drinking and smoking courtesy of the second greatest Hitchens brother

Christopher Hitchens · Booze and Fags

When the effects of drink are not extremely funny, they do have a tendency to be a bit grim. For every cheerful...

www.lrb.co.uk

How did one get from that to this? From smoking after dinner to smoking between courses – the inter-course cigarette – to smoking between bites? From drinking to acquire a manly hangover to drinking to dissolve an inhuman one? From having a cigarette after the act to reaching blindly for one during it? From explaining, Lucky Jim-like, to a hostess that you have burned and soused her sheets to explaining that you have singed her shower-curtain? How did all that happen? Eh? The jammed, thieving fag-machine that I nearly kicked to death long after all the pubs had closed and the last train had gone and the glass looked wide enough to reach through. The hotel mini-bar that I unsmilingly up-ended into my suitcase, dwarf Camparis compris, when about to take a plane to Libya. The pawing through the garbage – through the fridge, actually – in search of the lost cigarette packet. The broad-minded, sneering assault on the cooking sherry when the interviewee says: ‘No, in fact we don’t keep it in the house but perhaps there’s a glass of ...’ Here are the milestones of shame, or a few of them.

 

[Corpsey]

I liked this

"Smoking is, in men, a tremendous enhancement of bearing and address and, in women, a consistent set-off to beauty. Who has not observed the sheer loveliness with which the adored one exhales? That man has never truly palpitated."

 

[...]

Have you ever truly palpitated, @Corpsey?

 

[Murphy]

Walking home from the Skyy club

 

[Corpsey]

Some of the girls I've fancied most (actually all have them) have been smokers so I might have, albeit one-sidedly (tiny violin)

 

[...]

One of the good things about women who smoke is that they don't complain that you taste of fags.

 

[STN]

A writer I got into recently is Jonathan Meades, which all started when I read this article in the LRB (natch) about the Royals:

Jonathan Meades · Hatpin through the Brain: Closing Time for the Firm

They recognise the swoon in a fawner’s eye, the brisk music of a colour sergeant’s bark. They are touched by the...

www.lrb.co.uk

I read everything I could find by him in the archives, then got book of his essays and watched loads of his documentaries on YouTube.

I'm still a fan, but as with any of these (by necessity) hacks you start coming across the same opinions and turns of phrase in everything they've written and you quickly tire of their schtick.

My other 'big' find lately has been Anthony Burgess, who I haven't ready any novels (save Clockwork Orange decades ago) by but who's literary journalism (and books on Shakespeare, DH Lawrence and Joyce) is pretty fantastic.

Earthly Powers and Dead Man in Deptford are both excellent novels. I remember the Malay Trilogy being good too. A great talent with a tendency towards silliness, some of his novels are complete bollocks.
In fairness to Burgess ALL* of Meades’s novels are complete bollocks.

*both?

 

[...]

This is good work:

The DJ and the War Crimes — Rolling Stone

Thirty years after a death squad massacred civilians in Bosnia, none of the infamous Arkan’s Tigers have stood trial for their alleged part in those crimes.

investigation.rollingstone.com

 

[blissblogger]

I spent a large part of yesterday binge-reading David Thomson's film reviews for New Republic: https://newrepublic.com/authors/david-thomson

I've got his book 'Have you seen...', and have found it infuriating and badly written, so I was surprised to find myself enjoying his reviews so much. Not that I always agree with his opinions, but I appreciate that he HAS opinions, and he's about as 'poetic' a film critic as I've ever encountered.

I beg to disagree: that book is exquisitely written, and enjoyable even if - especially if - you disagree with his verdicts on films you like or dislike. I'm always blown away by the way he deftly threads together background stuff about the making of pictures (money, the process of a script coming into being, disagreements over casting etc) with aesthetic responses, zooms into details of scenes or performances, where a movie sits in the arc of a director's work, and meta-thoughts about the nature of cinema.

It's a great book to dip into and read a few entries, as is his epic achievement The Biographical Dictionary of Film.

The Big Screen, one of his proper book-books, is something I've had sitting on a shelf for ages but not got round to.

 

[luka]

what you realise when you talk to pro journalists is that they have utterly alien views on what well written exquisitely written etc prose is to a everyday normal person. they internalise rules that are alien to a normal person and when they see someone sticking to those rules they love it.
it's really weird.

 

[luka]

it's a pro thing. everyday worker thing. we like flair, dare, dash.. they like plodding water carrier prose. it sends them into raptures.

 

[luka]

theyll be stood in a cricle going oh isnt bruce great he's a true pro, he hardly ever makes a spelling mistake