The Missing Links
Unprinting. * Tom McCarthy and Ben Marcus at the Horse Hospital in London on 7 June. * Ten short films by Stewart Home from the 80s and 90s. * The making of The Rings of Saturn. * Walter Gropius on Utopianism (MP3). * Alain Badiou: a life in writing. * Why Alain Badiou stopped voting. […]
Common sense is here again
This book invites compulsive reading, but in very much the same way as Sandbrook’s counterfactual histories for the Daily Mail and the New Statesman do. In a recent ‘what if’, he chirpily imagined a second Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands facilitated by ‘the decision to lift the ban on women serving beneath the waves’, causing an expensive refit of Royal Navy submarines to ‘make them “female friendly”’. There’s a good deal of this hell-in-a-handcart jibbing in Seasons in the Sun.
Joe Kennedy reviews Dominic Sandbrook‘s Seasons in the Sun.
Radio on
The feel and mood of the office is definitely informed by my own experiences working in offices, and the particular quirks of every workplace, the unquestioned habits, the sounds you get used to, the cumulative effect of sitting in the same chair, in the same room every day, of smelling the same air. The building dread that Iris feels, and the little ways in which the office becomes increasingly absurd or “broken,” speak to the breakdown of the social contract, and the American promise of stability, of a secure future, in exchange for work. The contemporary reader knows that there is no such stability anymore. The whole construct is a house of cards, and Iris may not know what it is, but her unconscious knows something is happening here, to clumsily paraphrase Bob Dylan.
Maxi Kim interviews Radio Iris author Anne-Marie Kinney.