Itemised
I will call Knausgaard’s kind of writing ‘itemisation’. We have, in postmodernity, given up on the attempt to ‘estrange’ our daily life and see it in new, poetic or nightmarish, ways; we have given up the analysis of it in terms of the commodity form, in a situation in which everything by now is a commodity; we have abandoned the quest for new languages to describe the stream of the self-same or new psychologies to diagnose its distressingly unoriginal reactions and psychic events. All that is left is to itemise them, to list the items that come by. More
A Kazakh Scam
The next day I go to see Sergei and give him my interim findings. At one point he interrupts. ‘Why didn’t they come and speak to me?’ he asks. We both know why. And then without my having to raise it, he talks about the escape clause in the contract they could have used. ‘It wouldn’t have worked, mind you,’ he says with a twinkle. ‘But they could have tried.’ Finally we work our way through to Aleksei. I explain to Sergei that he had nothing to do with the fraud and was not aware of it. Sergei holds up an index finger: ‘Ah, but he should have been.’ Our conversation is over. More
‘The Third Man & Other Stories’
I don’t think the story offers any serious competition to the wonders of the film. But it no longer serves as a draft or a blueprint, and it holds its own very well among Greene’s or anyone else’s short stories. It’s waiting for us, asking us to read it, and reread it, even if it was initially supposed to disappear into the machinery of movie-making, like Harry Lime slipping off into the sewers of Vienna. More
What would it be like?
Regulation and laws: In the event of No Deal, MPs will have to pass between eight hundred and a thousand new statutory instruments through Parliament in a matter of days on urgent matters such as safety certificates for airlines and instruments that enable financial contracts to be enforced. Given the short timeframe, it is likely that many of these will be drafted directly from EU law. More
