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I   Some topics are understood differently depending on the register they're perceived by. Some stories can be interpreted differently depending on which character the audience anchors the story's gravity on. A narrative carries a slightly different meaning if each of the character’s lives has a different backstory and meaning.   I’ve been reading Virgil's Aeneid  for about fifteen to twenty years, and yet I still can read it differently. I read it again recently, through a g

OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK   Written in the 14th Century, around forty years after Dante's Divina Commedia , Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron is the only masterpiece I've ever read. I first read it before I wrote my first novel at twenty-three, and I remember reading it intensely to try to imitate its smooth and polished prose style. Including everything I've read since then I'd probably still call it the only true masterpiece.   In this book, a single author compiles 101 stories, th

Audiobook version read aloud in the video. An Anti-Analytical Analysis It was Michel de Montaigne who came up with the word “essay” (“essai”) for this sort of writing, which in French means “attempt.” He wasn’t trying to construct a system; he examined the texture of lived experience—habits, impulses, memories, fears. An essai  wasn’t a declaration of truth but an experiment in thinking, a way to test an idea by exploring it, and admitting uncertainty. It was a genre built o

“All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.” Richard Avedon   My father was a photographer. An amateur one. He was a chemist and immunologist. He was a managing director of one of the world's major pharmaceutical companies and then set up his own business. But he loved photography. He created the famous logo for the musical Cats with the dancers in the cat's eyes. I would look through his photography books when I was younger to understand the craft. A bygone wor

I recently visited the largest bookshop in the Northwest of the country, deciding to review the shelves under the New Fiction section, which I hadn't explored for a long time. When I visit bookshops, I browse by starting at one end and work my way across each row, reading the titles, synopsis, sometimes a few pages, until I’ve wandered through the entire section.   On arrival, my first impression was that publishers have been the first to ignore the phrase "Do not judge a bo

A full English copy of We can be read here https://gutenberg.org/files/61963/61963-h/61963-h.htm   THE WORLD OF "WE"   "I will attempt nothing more than to note down what I see, what I think or, to be more exact, what we think. That's right: we and let this WE be the title of these records." D-503, Record 1   We   is a Russian dystopian novel written by Yevgeny Zamyatin sometime between 1919 and 1921 but not published in Russia until 1988. Zamyatin was denied publishing permi

INTRODUCTION During the pandemic I set about writing my own translations of two of the least performed Ancient Greek tragedies by Sophocles: Women of Tragedy  and Philoctetes . Neglected, I feel, because they’re misunderstood through our modern sensibilities, which resists its original context. I designed the covers and editorial layout then had them printed in hardback versions. I then created a modernised vision of the work so the original meaning and dynamics of the play w

Why culture is stuck in perpetual adolescence.     INTRODUCTION The Rot of Culture Reality has always been a sixth sense rather than a common one. We live in a world where reality lies beneath appearances. Live with others as they are, not as you think they should be. Self-awareness of reality makes life more vivid, the more vivid it is the better it’s managed. Instead of tension, everything becomes a dance. The greatest sign of wisdom is the cheerfulness of an educated mind.

NOLAN’S ODYSSEY The whole purpose of adapting Homer to the cinema experience ought to be to tackle its visual potential. But the challenge is retaining its meaning. I'm excited that Nolan is going to tackle Homer’s Odyssey as a cinema experience. It's not the first and it's not the last. Dramatic adaptations of Homer have been happening since the Ancient Greeks themselves invented theatre and made plays of slices of his songs. Nolan’s approach to film will give it scale and w

A James Dazell Theory 🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕🌖🌗🌘🌑 “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end” Lucius Annaeus Seneca   PREMISE Culture is the proposal for a solution to the living aspect of the human experience of existence. Art is the preservation of the disposition of that proposal as an experience. Religion is a kind of conceptual thought to make the human experience more agreeable.     THE THEORY This theory came to me when I asked myself “ what’s the first thing to

I could be a philosopher such as the world never knew.” — Ninon de L'Enclos How you negotiate human behaviour is how you navigate...

“Je me disais qu'il s'enfuyait comme le temps, que c'était une idée facile et qu'il était agréable d'avoir des idées faciles. C'était...