books articles

The Cairngorm Massif

Cracking edition of the Guardian Review yesterday:

A beautiful piece on Nan Shepherd - the keeper of the Cairngorms - by the, at present, untouchable Robert Macfarlane. Shame the cheapest copy of the book I can find is for £30... (Edit: make that £60 - the power of a good review...)

Iain Sinclair moves a step closer to ubiquity with this great piece on Robert Camberton, an obscure writer about the denizens of London...

And, finally a companion piece by Robert Hughes to the huge Bacon show that is imminent at the Tate Modern. See also Peter Conrad's revealing biographical melange on Bacon from a couple of weeks back.

Posted by poacher in books articles at 13:53 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Some stuff to read for the evening:

Simon over at Ballardian on the putative link between Dubstep (in the guise of Kode9) and Ballard. Great piece.

The Guardian on the discovery of Kafka's writing papers

Posted by poacher in books articles at 17:14 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Minya Konka

I'm fast becoming a Robert Macfarlane fanboy. After reading the moving and inspiring The Wild Places (more of which sometime soon) I've recently bought his Mountains of the Mind and, on his recommendation, Waterlog by the sadly deceased manifestation of the Green Man, Roger Deakin (it was this beautiful elegy for Deakin that first alerted me to Macfarlane's writing, and subsequently Deakin's). Now I see this in Saturday's Guardian - an account of his journey to the massive Minya Konka mountain on the Chinese side of the Himalayas. Macfarlane is an academic at Cambridge, teaching English; he's also already got a wide history of exploration behind him, both local to Britain and otherwise. All this and he's only 32. The swine.

Posted by poacher in books articles at 13:12 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)