Julian Barnes’s The Pedant in the Kitchenwas written just for me, an enthusiastic but tabula rasa cook. On making risotto: As any domestic cook who’s ever made one knows, it’s virtually impossible to do anything during the final twenty minutes or so except stir, add liquid, worry; stir, add liquid, worry, and so on. At [...]
Yesterday I revisited a portion of Damon Young’s Distraction, a fifteen-page section called ‘Looking More Closely’ within a chapter on the philosophy of art. This book section examines why ‘many of our encounters with art are duds,’ straddling Marcel Proust’s early flop experience at the Balbec Cathedral, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s equation of art genre with [...]
Also posted in Learning Art |
Sergio, the dramatic, inspirational doco on the life and death of Sergio de Mellor, is more about the latter than the former. However, I noted that his idealism sprang up after a radical period at the Sorbonne in 1968. In other words, though it wasn’t put that way, he was a hippy, or at least [...]
Also posted in Film, Nonfiction |
Mainly docos on a busy Saturday: The Entrepreneur, made by Jonathan Bricklin, is a doco about Bricklin’s father, an irrepressible businessman in the car industry over decades. It proves to be a fascinating look at the unstoppable force of business, as the father chases investors and car manufacturing partners in China. 4 stars. Josh Whiteman’s Shadow [...]
A treat of a day: My only sci-fi movie from the festival (there don’t seem to be that many of them around these days), Moon (directed and conceived by Duncan Jones) is low-key drama about an astronaut seemingly going mad. The plot and direction contain a few jarring missteps, and the resolution was mediocre, but [...]
Eric Maisel is special to the numerous struggling creators, successful or not, who have used his many creativity books to motivate them and improve their art. I am one of them. My favourite Maisel books, to which I return often, are The Van Gogh Blues and Coaching the Artist Within. Anyone who has read Maisel’s last [...]
If the mark of a worthwhile book is onward reading, Mark Vernon’s Wellbeing (see my capsule review) meets the test: Vernon describes A Secular Age, Charles Taylor’s history of ideas, as ‘a long book and gathers an extraordinary amount of material, is remarkably even-handed, and sparkles with insights.’ I’ll also obtain a book I should have read when it [...]
Also posted in Nonfiction |
I’ve been attending this for six or seven years, although I did stand out for a couple of years because it is such an intense experience. Unfortunately, I cannot make myself attend just one or two sessions – as soon as I work through the program I grow too excited for modest exposure. This year, [...]
One of the books in the Undistraction category (recommended of course in Damon Young’s Distraction: A Philosopher’s Guide to Being Free), Paul Veyne’s 1993 (but published in translation from the French in 2003) Seneca: The Life of a Stoic proved to be a disappointment, but by no means the fault of the book itself. What I guess [...]
Also posted in Nonfiction |
English philosopher Mark Vernon edits a series called The Art of Living, containing a dozen books with one-word titles like Hunger, Work and Decepti0n, all meant to ‘engage wide audiences’ to philosophical takes on everday life. I suspect Vernon’s own contribution to the series, Wellbeing, is at the heart of the series, and I certainly [...]
Also posted in Nonfiction |