Art Kavanagh

I’m celebrating Coltrane’s centenary in a highly unorthodox way: listening to Christian Sands, Thomas Fonnesbæk and Rasmus Kihlberg play “A Giant Leaves (Giant Steps/Autumn Leaves) — for Alex Riel” from Between Then & Now 🎶

Sarah Moss has published nine novels, of which Ghost Wall (2018) is the sixth.

I ordered a CD from Denmark a little over 2 weeks ago.

‘If you really believed AI was going to kill us all why would you participate?’

Altman and tech “leaders” who rush ahead with AI while simultaneously warning of the risks of catastrophe probably take so-called Roko’s basilisk seriously.

I’d have sworn Sandy Denny had died earlier than 1978.

A few months ago, I wrote about Anthony Cronin’s recently reissued memoir, Dead As Doornails, particularly as that book recounts Cronin’s recollections of Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh.

(For the record, I also thought Madeleine Peyroux sounded too much like Billie Holiday and Wallace Roney sounded too much like Miles Davis.)

Somebody mentioned that it’s John Coltrane’s centenary this month 🎶

Nine days ago, I failed to post a piece I’d intended to write about Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake (2024) because I realized, late in the day, that my grasp of the novel’s themes and effect were shakier than I had thought.

I’m sorry to have to tell you that there isn’t going to be a full post today, as there should have been.

… who subscribe to a set of authoritarian ideas and plans for the future based on half-baked theories and an incomplete understanding of how the world works.

Today I couldn’t get my dinky little toy HP wireless printer (which I tend to use at least once most years) to connect to the wireless router and I discovered the previously unsuspected fact that I can connect to it straight from the Mac without going thr…

the hard left will always pair a conceivably popular economic programme with a provably hated cultural one.

I like to remind myself every so often that Leopold Bloom was the same age (38) on 16 June 1904 as Cleopatra was in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.

I heard small snippets of Burning Bright (1994) when it was serialized on BBC Radio 4 in the 1990s: enough to grab my attention but not to give me an overall impression of the book’s shape or a reliable sense of its themes.

According to this Guardian headline, Sam Neill filmed role in Legend of Zelda film adaptation before his death.

I’ve finally finished reading At Swim-Two-Birds.

For several years now, I’ve preferred to buy albums on CD.

Before he found huge success with the Slough House/Slow Horses series of spy novels, Mick Herron wrote a short crime fiction series: four books known variously as the Zoë Boehm and the Oxford Investigations series.

There will be no new additions to Susie Steiner’s series of three novels featuring the Cambridgeshire cop Manon Bradshaw, a detective sergeant in Missing, Presumed (2016) and a detective inspector in the later novels.

Farrago doesn’t “find comedy funny”.

It’s been 14 years since I’ve been in London (or any part of the UK), so obviously I don’t keep up with what’s on in the theatre.

Recommended Wynn Williams’s book [Careless People] to a friend, who bought it.

Two of Scott Turow’s three most recent novels tell the stories of the final legal cases of two characters who were introduced in his first novel almost forty years ago.

I answered without stopping to think.

Michael Beard, Nobel Prize winner for Physics and antihero of Ian McEwan’s 2010 novel, Solar, is a grotesquely comic character.

Someone on the train has the Z Cars theme as his (I’m assuming) ringtone!

Until a few months ago it hadn’t occurred to me that Anthony Head and Murray Head could be brothers.