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."