Blog

Unwrapped Sky, Illustration One:

My publishers, Tor, not to long ago ran an illustrators Masterclass at Amherst University. The students were given my book, Unwrapped Sky, as one of their assignments. Here’s the discription the students were given: Rjurik Davidson’s Unwrapped Sky, which will be published by Tor Books in the upcoming year, was a chance for the students to work […]

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Exit Through the Gift Shop: Art and PR

  When B was here, he recommended we watch Banksy’s film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, a fascinating documentary about a man who has set out to make a documentary about Banksy. It traces the rise of Thierry (Terry as he is called) from street-artist side-kick to artist himself. At first, the street-artists who Terry meets […]

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The Arrival of Mr B

B arrived for a 48 hour visit. We picked him up in Tampere, walked through the city, sat by the river, talked. But the real enjoyment came the following day when we visited the Zoo. A Finnish zoo is an exotic affair for an Australian: wolverines, bears, wolves, the most magnificent owls, a wondrous little […]

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Ghostly Lake

  Sometimes Finland offers glimpses of the most spectacular beauty. On this morning, a ghostly fog had descended over the city, and the lake looked like something from a gothic novel. One almost expected a ship to come creaking over the water, its sails tattered and ruined, its crew mysteriously gone. Then we would know […]

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Toward the Boardwalk: Lovecraft, Modernism and Boardwalk Empire

Lately, my world has been shrinking. First, the move to Finland, which has meant arrival in a land where I don’t speak the language. Of course, everyone – well almost everyone –  here speaks English, but that’s countervailed by the notorious Finnish introversion. I find myself in a place far from most of my friends. […]

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Injury

I’ve spent most of the last month horizontal on a couch, either reading or watching television on my computer. A month ago, I re-injured – re-bulged? – the C-7 disc at the base of my neck. The effect was to have pain in all the muscles surrounding the right shoulder, and running down the right […]

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Lefebvre’s French Revolution

They don’t write books like Lefebvre’s anymore. As one of the two or three twentieth century experts on the French Revolution, Lefebvre was entitled to give a definite interpretation of the Revolution. But actually, his certainty of analysis and representation comes from a different era of history writing – the era before the rise of […]

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A Verdant Land

Someone from the antipodes is struck by the incredible lushness of the green, the sense that everything is alive. So far from deep reds and crackling dryness of the ‘sunburnt’ southern land. There seems also to be something missing, but one can’t quite fathom what it is. The sense, then, is of being decentred, of […]

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The New Old World

The New Old World by Perry Anderson My rating: 4 of 5 stars This book is composed of articles Anderson had written over a decade or so, mostly for the LRB. This gives the book an uneven structure, as the pieces were written at different times for slightly different purposes. What’s more – as surveys […]

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