Art Kavanagh

The first time I ever saw Liam Neeson act it was in “My Dear Palestrina”, a television dramatization by Bernard MacLaverty of his short story of the same title. I was deeply impressed by Neeson’s performance and MacLaverty’s story alike, and left with the strong hunch that MacLaverty was one of the best short story writers alive. Yet, over the next 40 years, I read at most two more of his short stories.

Earlier this week I was surprised to learn that Ivor Browne had, until just a few days ago, still been alive. I hadn’t heard anything about him for decades. Now, he’s turned up in Ted Gioia’s The Honest Broker

Has Substack changed the way it handles link previews? I stopped including Twitter card meta tags in my blog posts about a year ago. For a while I replaced them with OG meta tags but I dropped all except OG:image because the others were just repeating what was already in the default meta tags.

My blog hasn’t been updating for the past few days. I just want to see if a new post will dislodge it.

Hi @help @manton There’s something strange going on with my blog. The log is full of lines like this

Publish: Already queued, scheduling +30 seconds

and it never finishes publishing. Any idea what’s up? Thanks.

I think I might disable crossposting from Micro.blog to BlueSky (the only place I have it enabled) because more often than not, once I’ve posted something on MB, I go straight over to BlueSky and delete the crosspost. Other hand, it’s nice being able to post proper links on 🦋 🤷🏻‍♂️

In the long run, student plagiarists are mostly harming themselves, and so we should discourage them from plagiarism for the same reason that we discourage them from binge drinking or unprotected sex: for their own good.

Thoughtful and sensible piece by Tim Harford on plagiarism and related questions: The rights and wrongs of copying

My apologies to everybody who follows my newsletter, Talk about books, by RSS. The RSS for yesterday’s post, about Robert Browning’s poem, “My Last Duchess” went a bit haywire halfway through, and apparently stopped recognizing the angle brackets in html tags. I don’t know why this happened but it seems to have something to do with the fact that I used em spaces to indent the lines of poetry. The web version of the post is displaying correctly, if you’d like to read it there.

Here is the first Talk about books post of 2024. “I choose Never to stoop”: Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess”. The monologue is more effective as drama if we don’t assume that the Duke’s negotiations with the Count’s emissary end in success.

In 1936, Louis S Friedland claimed to identify the historical figures portrayed by Robert Browning in “My Last Duchess” (1842). According to Friedland, the poem’s speaker, the Duke, is Alfonso d’Este, fifth Duke of Ferrara, and the person he is addressing is Nikolaus Madruz, an emissary representing Ferdinand, Count of Tyrol. The count is one of the sons of Ferdinand I, Emperor of Austria. Before his death, Ferdinand I had almost concluded negotiations — the amount of the dowry had been agreed — for the marriage of his daugheter, Barbara, to Alfonso.

SEC Twitter account hacked; Twitter says two-factor authentication wasn’t enabled. Is it legal for Twitter to make it public whether 2FA is enabled on an account? Should it be?

Existential crises are also a recent phenomenon, and involve a use of the word “existential” you won’t find in any dictionary. It … means “actually existing”. So an existential crisis is an actually existing one, which is the only kind of crisis you’re likely to come across.

Terry Eagleton quibbles with The perversion of the English language. I thought an existential crisis was one that threatened the existence of the thing affected, a situation that might kill, destroy or end (rather than merely damage) it.

… the kinds of book I am most likely to abandon are history and theology; the kinds I am least likely to abandon are novels and biographies.

writes Alan Jacobs. That makes perfect sense to me, substituting “literary criticism” for “theology”.

The last Talk about books post of 2023 is about Emma Healey’s two novels, 📖Elizabeth Is Missing (2014) and Whistle in the Dark (2018). Happy New Year, all. The next post will be on 10 Jan or a few days later.

When I see someone reading a book on the train, I usually try to see what the title is and who wrote it. I suppose I like to know which books attract different kinds of reader. One day in 2015, I was on a train in France and noticed a woman reading a book with the title L’Oubli by an author I’d never heard of before, Emma Healey. I immediately guessed that the book was a translation from the English.

Bandcamp has a previously unreleased live album by Mads Vinding, recorded 2018, with Dado Moroni on piano 🎹. I’m very tempted, except for a 9-minute version of “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise”, perhaps my least favourite standard 🎶

Mince, Delors! Jacques Delors destroyed the European left. Actually, I don’t agree with much of this analysis but I think it’s worth reading.

… although not an especially good cook, Eve is always ready with sage advice about the arts of the kitchen. One of her more irritating sayings is “you can’t bake when you’re angry,” and Villanelle is incandescent when she bakes the lemon cake.

Part 6 of Killing Eve: Resurrection is now on Substack. Eve Polastri has been snatched from their St Petersburg apartment and Villanelle must wait for the kidnappers to let her know what they want. Patience is a virtue but it’s not one of her virtues.

I just read the first 5 instalments of Luke Jennings’s Killing Eve: Resurrection on Substack. I hadn’t read his original books📚 or watched the tv series but they don’t seem to be necessary to enjoy this. New instalments at weekly intervals, and it’s free to read.

I’ve never liked bagels …

writes John Naughton. I must say the concept of “liking bagels” caused me a certain amount of cognitive dissonance when I read that. Bagels aren’t for liking, they’re for holding the filling in.

It looks as if Bluesky might where several of the people I used to enjoy following on Twitter have ended up. People like John Self for example.

I was wondering how it was that I’d never heard of the Irish film November Afternoon 🍿 till I remembered that in 1996 I’d been living in London for 9 years, visited home only rarely and didn’t have internet access (the following year, I’d be visiting the Irish Times web site daily). That’s how.

Now Threads has come to the EU I’m reminded that I don’t want an Instagram account or anything from Meta. Maybe it’s time to try Bluesky instead. If some kind Micro.blogger has an invitation to spare, I’d be very grateful.

The new Talk about books post is about A Stranger with a Bag, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s collection of thirteen stories includes several which feature “strangers”, people who are in some sense out of place.

My previous post, about Jane Austen, got a comment, which I greatly appreciate, from Matt Kaul. The collection of thirteen short stories now titled A Stranger with a Bag was originally published as Swans on an Autumn River in (as far as I can tell: the information available online is confusing) 1961, then rereleased under its present title five years later. I suspect that the change of title was meant to emphasize the importance of the stranger in these stories.