Agents of Empire

Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World

Noel Malcom, 2015

(November 2017)

  

A fascinating book. Takes as its premise the interconnected stores of a family of minor Albanian nobility, and follows them through their various trials and tribulations in Venice, the Balkans, and Istanbul in the late 1500s. Slightly ponderous writing, but not overbearingly so, and every so often contains gems such as this: "…the chronicler Ureche would have nothing good to say about Aron. His main passions, allegedly, were 'pillage, debauchery, gambling and bagpipe-players.'" Thorough, enlightening, and on occasion surprisingly funny.

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë, 1847

(February 2017)

  

Jesus Christ, what an absolute shower of cunts.

Death Sentences

Kawamata Chiaki, 1984 [Thomas Lamarre & Kazuko Y. Behrens, 2012]

(January 2017)

Death Sentences is, at least as far as plot goes, about a poem that causes anyone to read it to die. The blurb suggests that this conceit is shared with The Ring, but for me the obvious comparator is Monty Python:

Orientalism

Edward W. Said, 1978

(October 2012)

There’s a type of person. A certain type of person. You know who I mean, the type that’s heard about ‘books furnishing a room’ and taken that to mean that books are more important for what they look like and what signals having them is supposed to send out than the words and ideas they contain. Wankers, in other words.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Century: 2009

and the Black Dossier

Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neil, 2012, 2007

(July 2012)

Contemporary Culture! Alan Moore is disappointed with you!

Google Image Search is a Joy

But I'm sure you knew that already.

I know my writing can be a bit wordy, so it's nice to break it up with some pictures and pretty shapes and colours. Recently I was doing that and stumbled upon the oeuvre of Jade K Scott. There's been a bit of hand-wringing about people using Kindles and the like for reading smut, instead of the relentlessly improving works they might otherwise be grinding through if people could actually see the covers. I, however, can only applaud Ms Scott and her ilk for identifying a potential market and pursuing it with such verve and consistency. It would be beneath me to suggest that she's just a pseudonym for a bunch of cut n' paste merchants and/or monkeys with typewriters.

I now present a selection of titles from the first two pages of a Google Image search for "jade k scott", for the elucidation of those of you who remain unhappily ignorant of the canon.