Jon Ronson/LARB

Reviewed Ronson's latest book for the LA Review of Books.

Reading: America; The Conclave

Am in the process of transferring content over to my new blog at my recently redesigned website.

Steve McQueen

A review for Modern Painters on Steve McQueen's recent show at Thomas Dane Gallery.

Reading Caribou Island; Absurdistan; Strong Opinions; Baudelaire selected essays; The Painted Word; Speak, Memory; Pale Fire; The Laughing Monsters; Paranoia: a 21st Century Fear; Tree of Smoke; Empire of the Sun; The Kindness of Women; So You've Been Publicly Shamed; Blue Nights; Boyhood Island; Our Man in Havana; End of the Affair, Quiet, Brideshead Revisited (finally); The Psychopath Test; Them; Sleepyhead; Frank; Lost at Sea; Out of the Ordinary; the Buddha of Suburbia; Jerusalem (script); Brooklyn; The Dark Net; The Picturegoers; Gilead; Elizabeth is Missing

BOMB/Millions

I've got a review on Richard Ford's Let Me Be Frank With You at The Millions and an interview with Laura Buckley at BOMB Magazine.

Two smaller pieces: something on writers' rooms for the Long & Short and a Q&A with Julie Verhoeven for Dazed Online.

Reading: The Killer Inside Me; The Gift; Chess; Engleby; What Happened to Art Criticism?; Roger's Version; A Death in the Family; A Man in Love; Live and Learn

Soho House/Sussex

For Soho House (£) here's a round-up I did of the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition, an interview ahead of a Jasper Johns show at the Courtauld Gallery; a preview of the Horst V&A show; an interview with Piet Oudolf.

Am going to be joining the University of Sussex from September as a part-time Teaching Fellow on their new Journalism BA.

Reading: Shooting an Elephant, Nausea (re-read), Jude the Obscure, The Circle, Thomas Mann's Dr Faustus, Master and Margarita, Gasping for Airtime, Poking a Dead Frog, Randall, The People's Platform, Supergods, Digital Disconnect, Canada, The Sportswriter, Independence Day, Let Me Be Frank With You, The Line of Beauty, Concrete Island

Co-housing

I have a piece on co-housing in the Independent magazine.

Reading: Rum Punch, To The Lighthouse, Flight from the Enchanter, Fool's Gold (non-fiction), The Shallows (non-fiction), The Sea, The Sea, High-Rise, The Big Con (non-fiction), The Ice Storm, Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (non-fiction), The Sandcastle, Leaving the Atocha Station, The Sovereignty of Good, Idiopathy, The Outsider (re-read), The Savage Detectives, Mother's Milk, The Sea, La Jalousie, Death Sentence, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P, Žižek on Lacan

I'm assembling a YouTube channel with some of the lectures I've been doing at Kingston over the past year.

Lore Segal

Another interview for Guernica, this time with Lore Segal.

Reading Under the Net, Remains of the Day, Emma, Dreams of a Final Theory, Norwegian Wood, Brighton Rock, Telegraph Avenue, Stoner, Austerlitz, Revolutionary Road, End Zone, Maps and Legends, Wonder Boys, Drown, NW, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, There But For The, White Noise, The Sound and the Fury, The Rachel Papers, The End of Mr Y, Completion, Fortress of Solitude, Slaughterhouse 5 (re-read), Decline and Fall, Rabbit at Rest, Deaf Sentence, Blood Meridian, Self-Consciousness, Golf Dreams, Thérèse Raquin, Eat My Heart Out, The Centaur, The Girl of Slender Means, The Godless Boys, Couples, Fear and Trembling, Bech: A Book, The Hustler, Get Me Out of Here, The Talented Mr Ripley

Most of the books I'm working through are from this list (which is US biased) and this one, along with novels cropping up during my MA.

Catherine O'Flynn

I interviewed her for Guernica magazine.

Also reading: Lucinella, Of Mutability, Pnin, The Rest is Noise, Leaves of Grass, The Shipping News, The Berlin Stories.  

Wordpress

For the next few months I'm going to maintain this blog alongside a Wordpress site where I combine this content with new material on arts and digital journalism. So, please see here for a little while if it's of interest.

I'm reading George Brock's Out of Print: Journalism in the Digital Age, which came out earlier this month.

Also working through Caught and Loving by Henry Green along with The Trip to Echo Spring, Robert Macfarlane's Holloway, Lore Segal's Half the Kingdom, Wuthering Heights, Cheever's Collected Stories, Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Writing, Cathedral, Shakespeare's Kitchen, Portrait of a Lady; The Emergence of Memory (a great book of essays on WG Sebald).

Tim Hetherington

I wrote the cover of the Indy's art supplement on a forthcoming Tim Hetherington exhibition (link/PDF).

I've got a contract for 2013-2014 at Kingston University's Journalism BA teaching part-time, which begins later in September.

Reading the News Where You Are.

One of many clever and insightful passages (on Don Quixote) from Burning Down the House, Charles Baxter's 1998 collection of essays.

"...one can understand why, when Don Quixote is dying and has regained his lucidity, Sancho Panza wants him to be his old self again: heroic and mad and epical. Living by himself, Sancho is going to be stuck with a paunch and a world of mute things. So much the worse for him, but he has survived, in the way that laboratory science has survived its unruly spirit-obsessed parent, alchemy, and for some of the same reasons. Marxism survives Hegelianism until something turns up to replace dialectical materialism. Everyone remembers Sancho Panza's tears at the deathbed of Don Quixote. Materialism without ideals, mad or not, weeps. Deprived of a quest, it is consigned to centuries of weeping."

Taipei

Reviewed Tao Lin's Taipei for the National.

Also reading EM Forster's Aspects of the Novel, the Art of Fiction (David Lodge), Rabbit is Rich, Perfect Spy, Susanna Jones's When Nights Were Cold, Catherine O'Flynn's Mr Lynch's Holiday & What Was Lost, James Wood's How Fiction Works, Umberto Eco's Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, Eudora Welty's On Writing, Pride and Prejudice, Charles Baxter's Burning Down the House (which is incredible).

Shot a little video of the Tate's project space exhibition, probably best viewed via YouTube. The editors used library music, I'm guessing.

Reviewed Benoit Maire at David Roberts Art Foundation.

All That Is

Reviewed James Salter's All That Is for the Independent on Sunday.

Also reading Infinite Jest, Eeeee Eee Eeee, Taipei, Less than Zero, Madame Bovary, Zadie Smith's essays, Margaret Atwood's Negotiating with the Dead.

Bishop/Wentworth

Reviewed Steve Bishop and Richard Wentworth for Modern Painters.

A piece on programming exhibitions for Museums Journal's May edition.

I did a lecture for the Kingston MA students on review writing. It's here (as a compressed movie file).

From Monday I'm going to be working with Louise Blouin Media as a consultant, working across Artinfo.com, Modern Painters and Art + Auction.

Reading Tinker Tailor, Even the Dogs, Rabbit Redux, Sixty Stories, Penguin's Nietzsche reader.

Delicate truth

Reviewed the new Le Carré for the Independent.

Reviewed Red Joan for The National in Abu Dhabi.

Also reading Sense and Sensibility, HHhH, Airships/Ray, Tender is the Night, New York Trilogy.

From the summer I'll be taking over a monthly round-up column of London exhibitions for Modern Painters.

Now have PDFs of reviews of Antony Gormley at White Cube, Jannis Kounellis at Parasol Unit and Sachin Kaeley at Seventeen Gallery.

Also got a piece behind this paywall on impact vs collections in museums.

I've been workshopping some short stories at Birkbeck, on one of their short courses.

Wrote a brief, ostensibly funny comment piece for the Independent on working from home (pegged to the Yahoo story on flexible working). Also reviewed Will Storr's first novel for the Independent on Sunday.

Reading: Jesus's Son, Kate Clanchy's Samarkand, Russian Debutante's Handbook.

Haiti & contemporary art

I wrote a piece for The White Review comparing the recent work of Atis Rezistans at Nottingham Contemporary to Don Dellilo's Falling Man, Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and Bill Viola's The Passions.

Reading: Sentimental Education, Angels (Denis Johnson), Gogol's edited stories. Denis Johnson's work is incredible.

I'm about to do three lectures/workshops for Kingston University's arts journalism department. You can find the class-notes for the arts news/features lecture here (access using QuickTime; pause on each slide).

Post-war & contemporary

I wrote a piece off the back of the Hirst/Gagosian split, pegged to ArtTactic's latest figures on the post-war & contemporary art market, for The Evening Standard.

Reading: Werewolves in their Youth; Reading Like a Writer (Francine Prose); Leviathan (Philip Hoare); Dubliners.

Elmgreen & Dragset @ Victoria Miro

Review of Elmgreen & Dragset for January Modern Painters; again click on the image to read.