October 2010
1 post
August 2010
1 post
The Oddly Upsetting Couple - Goldblum and Ruehl in...
Whatever I expected from The Prisoner of Second Avenue, it certainly wasn’t what I got. This New York comedy seemed a fair candidate for enjoyableness; it certainly has an impeccable pedigree, having been written by Woody Allen’s old mucker, The Odd Couple playwright Neil Simon. What’s more, in its 1971 Broadway incarnation this play starred Peter Falk (aka Columbo!), and in 1975 it was made...
July 2010
1 post
Insecurity cloaked as hardy realism – the Con-Dem...
“The great secret of morals is love,” wrote Percy Shelley, “or a going out of our own nature.” Effusive and excessive as P.B. could sometimes be, I am firmly in his camp regarding humans’ need to strive against our innate self-containedness; in fact this is a political imperative too.
Of course, in the loftiest, most existential sense and at the most grindingly practical level, each of us is...
June 2010
2 posts
Good but not extraordinary - All My Sons at the...
Arthur Miller often said that if All My Sons had not been a success he would have given up writing and ‘found some other line of work.’ Theatregoers probably feel that they owe this play a great deal, therefore; and in a way they do. But modern audiences, whatever their admiration for Miller, are privileged to approach this 1947 work from the vantage of 2010. They can see what this play’s...
Drilling down, and the salad on the menu
Gnome’s own Andrew brought my attention to this fascinating piece reporting on a forthcoming study which suggests that the presence of salads and other healthy options on fast-food menus actually leads customers to make less healthy choices.
The name of the column is ‘Drilling Down’, and I wonder if that might be one piece of irritating management-speak destined to become less voguish in the...
May 2010
5 posts
Calling all Sweet Valley fans!
There’s a new way to show your appreciation of Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield: write a “snarky recap” of your favourite book.
“Look right down any crowded hall
You’ll see there’s a beauty standing - -
Is she really everywhere, or her reflection?
One always goes up to you
The other’s shy and quiet
Could there be two different girls who look the same
At Sweet Valley High…?”
Why yes,...
Noise in Istanbul
Last week’s story about singing lessons for muezzin (here) was more about below-average reproduction of holy word, or call to prayer (and, then, the word), than it was about noise pollution.
I imagined that these lessons would occur in boot camps, muezzin evacuating the sprawling Eurasian city for a week in the countryside (but which side?) leaving… silence.
Or, leaving The Morning...
Medieval futures
Good morning. Welcome to the future. Or, welcome to now.
If anything sounds more pompous than ‘welcome to the future’, it is ‘welcome to now’. This is probably one of many reasons why the former is favoured by rhetoricians. Oliver Hyams has explained why the Stern Review causes problems for policy-makers who need to act in all the tenses, in his essay for gnome. Charlie...
How do we value the future? Oliver Hyams learns...
Could you put a monetary value on your own life?
This question is less about the contents of your bank account or your life insurance policy, and more about how much another might pay to save you from a nasty fate.
Such a cost is not easy to calculate. In reality, the value depends on the valuer: a family member will be willing to part with more than someone you have never met. To approach a...
On Polling Day in the UK.
In the UK, the most exaggerated, important and/or interesting (I lump for ‘fun’) general election campaign in recent history, is about to end.
gnome has been on a short holiday. This has not been due to overexcitement, nor party-political angst. We will be returning with more writers and offline things soon.
While gnome thaws, we bring to your attention GIF PARTY. Perfect for a...
April 2010
3 posts
Cut the waffle: electability vs delectability
Have you been feeling that contemporary politicians are a bit soft lately? That they’re all a bit gooey when it comes to the economy? That they really should stop waffling on about the trivialities before the country starts to crumble?
Tenuous food puns aside, the political process has been marred by some rather unsavoury goings-on of late, and the joker in the House of Commons who feebly shouted...
Ben Franklin and Newspapers in the Cloud
A while back now the Newspaper Club caught my eye. A simple, anyone-can-use printing service seems a great idea, and it is certainly positive. But I never mentioned it to anyone because, straight away, the concept felt tired (even to an unconditional-lover of print). I forgot about it.
Then, this week, I read about some Journalists in New York (and John Paton at CUNY) who are making newspapers...
A sociological look at chatroulette, by Sarah...
The renowned sociologist Erving Goffman once said that “a conversation has a life of its own and makes demands on its own behalf. It is a little social system with its own boundary-maintaining tendencies; it is a little patch of commitment and loyalty with its own heroes and its own villains.” This quotation struck a chord with me a few weeks ago, as, for the first time, I navigated the...
March 2010
12 posts
Biodiversity on the rocks: what's a...
“Especially this is written for those souls… who are prevented by the invincible decrees of Fate from ever seeing the wonders of the Wilderness save in the pages of a book.” - Dedication from Tales of an Empty Cabin by Grey Owl.
In 1931 Archibald Belaney, also known by his adopted Ojibwa name “Grey Owl”, wrote about the importance of conserving the beaver and its habitat. A fur trapper and...
Is there anybody in there? Jonathan Webb reports...
How does conscious experience arise from a kilogram of damp, grey, rumpled tissue? There is, of course, no easy answer. Consciousness tends to make scientists nervous - even the ones who have pitched their careers towards unravelling the billions of cells and thousands of miles of fibres that make it possible. The field of neuroscience employs an army of researchers, nearly all chiselling...
Lights, Camera, Inaction: public debates and the...
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation
Guy Debord, The Society of The Spectacle (1967).
The social critic Theodor Adorno famously complained that a modern alliance of culture and entertainment both debased culture and elevated...
Dave on the make: Trevor McDonald meets David...
I am not ashamed (well, I am a bit) to admit that I’m the sort of voter who could be swayed by a piece of programming – but then so are many people. David Cameron knows this and it is pretty startling, therefore, that he thought that having Trevor McDonald follow him around on TV was the way to win votes. Not to be partisan: it is startling that Gordon Brown thought appearing on Piers Morgan’s...
WMDs on the WWW.
The possession and disclosure of information debate is doing the rounds. gnome and I are positive about spreading it. Others, not so.
It is not new, to whine about impinging security cameras. And I understand there is a commercial imperative for some companies, specifically those with a profile as impressive as Google’s, to be conscious of their strength. To this end, we have seen some programs...
1 tag
Lies of the Land: Edward Randell explores the art...
Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there.
Joseph...
3 tags
"I Love You, Phillip Morris", with context
Coincidentally, just as Roberta was poppin’ out her post on A Single Man, a friend took me to a preview screening of I Love You, Phillip Morris, in which Ewan McGregor and Jim Carrey go rather spectacularly gay. Having seen both movies and read Roberta’s lucid take on Tom Ford’s Fabergé egg of a movie, I would definitely say that Phillip Morris had the more distancing effect on...
The shadow of our sorrow: mimesis not catharsis in...
I know it’s been a short while since A Single Man came out, and Colin Firth didn’t win the Oscar and all – though he did win a Bafta, give a brilliant speech, and look super-fly while he was at it. But I’ve been thinking about this film ever since I saw it, and I’m only just working out why Tom Ford’s directorial début, though fantastic in many ways, didn’t quite do it for me.
By ‘do it for me’,...
Ogredubbing on The Believer
Here at gnome we’re firm believers in The Believer. Witness this fantastic piece by Brian Edwards, from their March/April film issue, about the popularity of underground dubbed versions of Shrek in Iran.
A few disconnected thoughts on this:
#1 What is it with Shrek as a cultural icon? He was Will Smith’s companion of choice for the apocalypse in I Am Legend. And every time a crap...
Free time
Clay Shirky told me that society’s critical new habit since WWII has been the (9-5 x 5) working week and, consequently, FREE TIME.
He says that FREE TIME was filled right up with TV until the internet thwunked in.
And now I am listening to Backdoor Broadcasting, specifically Alain De Botton on working life, before I wake up and catch the train to work.
There are also much more...
'A living, breathing allegory of want': paywall...
The Financial Times’ Digital Media & Broadcasting Conference held in London today has shed renewed light on the question of whether, and how, the public should pay for online journalism.
The conference’s main output so far seems to have been (t)witterings about ‘smartness’ and ‘dynamism’, the likening of Google to the very air we breathe, and that old...
February 2010
16 posts
Ulrich Beck at the LSE
For those who don’t regularly partake in the dark, ironic arts of social theory, I would recommend Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society (1987) as a work that speaks to real life whilst looking at the big picture. It’s a good read in great English, and (despite being written in the aftermath of Chernobyl) resonates sharply with the steaminess of the climate crisis.
I went with some...
Gnomes and the banking crisis
It’s not often that our kitsch namesakes make the front page of the BBC News website, but it seems today is a red-letter day for the red-hatted little gits.
posted by Edward
Book Marks
I think websites like this: The Big Project, should be appreciated for their design and their determination.
But they sharpen the memorial-hall divide between those who like to catalogue life and those who know they will never have the time.
I sit somewhere in the middle - I end up with clutter.
posted by Ossie
The Strange Case of the Giant Rat of Sumatra: Eley...
‘Matilda Briggs was not the name of a young woman, Watson,’ said Holmes in a reminiscent voice. ‘It was a ship which is associated with the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared.’
(‘The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire’, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, 1927)
This is the flourish by which Doyle introduces both the most...
4 tags
Amis and the absence of imagination, by Roberta...
I am fed up with Martin Amis: in this I am far from alone. My heart, of course, goes out to all the haters, particularly to Anna Ford for her open letter to Amis in Saturday’s Guardian. However, I think the detractors of the soi-disant ‘bad boy’ (or as he’d have himself, the ‘Prince Charles’) of English letters have omitted to criticise something important about this author, maybe even the most...
We like wordclouds
especially the gorgeous ones at Wordle.
So we’ve made some for our essays.
Alasdair Flint: "Proust, No Telly And Me"
Happy Lent, all. That is, if Lent’s supposed to be happy. Here at gnome we’re too pancake-bloated to remember.
To get in the seasonal spirit friend-of-gnome Alasdair Flint has decided to spend his Lent depriving himself of TV and reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. We salute him.
Keep abreast of his efforts here.
The Player, Played: gaming comes of age. By Hugh...
The biggest-selling computer game of 2009, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, became notorious among the non-gaming public at its release for two things: an unprecedentedly glitzy premiere, red carpet and all, and a wave of controversy over its exceptionally violent content. Labour MP Keith Vaz, no stranger to moral outrage, felt moved to raise a question in Parliament about what measures would be...
Not Being Personal Or Anything... By Andrew...
In 1969, the American radical feminist Carol Hanisch produced a paper called ‘The Personal is Political’. Already a veteran of civil rights and feminist groups such as New York Radical Women, Hanisch was troubled by the separation of women’s personal experiences from the work radical feminists were doing to dismantle the large-scale gender order. She emphasised the importance of discussion and...
When the ‘little monkey’ becomes the...
Alan Bennett’s newest play is a masterclass in metatheatricality. The Habit of Art is set in the National Theatre during rehearsals for a play by an unnamed writer, whose theme is an imagined late-in-life meeting between erstwhile friends Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden. The play, called Caliban’s Day in an allusion to Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror, is presented to us complete with...
Calling all artists and illustrators
We are looking to incorporate illustrations alongside, and loosely inspired by, our essays.
If you’d like to have your work on the site, get in touch.
gnome [dot] magazine [at] gmail [dot] com
Gnome essays
(most recent first)
How do we value the future? Oliver Hyams learns lessons from the Stern Review.
Biodiversity on the rocks: what’s a conservationist to do? By Alex Cagan
Is there anybody in there? Jonathan Webb reports from science’s erstwhile final frontier: consciousness.
Lights, Camera, Inaction: public debates and the erosion of authentic engagement. By Abigail Jones
Lies of the...
1 tag
5x15 - new lecture series at the Tabernacle in...
as spotted by Anna:
http://bit.ly/9GPm5U
Next one’s Monday 22nd Feb.
January 2010
7 posts
3 tags
Intelligence Squared debate: 'Europe is failing...
Bloody brilliant: FREE debate courtesy of Intelligence Squared and the British Council.
If you don’t know much about Intelligence Squared, invest some time in their website is probably best. It is pretty flash and they have got the big names in for this one. If you don’t know much about the British Council, ditto - they’ve got vimeo, they’ve got twitter, what haven’t...
1 tag
Think Tanks Fight... New Deal of the Mind Event
News: On February 9th the right-on people at New Deal of the Mind are doing an exciting fight with some bright people at the Southbank Centre. All left bank and sophisticated. ft. Rory Bremner. New Deal of The Mind is ’a coalition of artists, entrepreneurs and opinion formers who recognise the economic, social and cultural value of Britain’s creative talent’.
UPDATE: our friends at...
Blogs readers read
Tosh Pit
Gin and Biscuits
Image Dissectors
Letters Of Note
Tour de Force - clothes yeh.
The Boursa Exchange - Cairo
Snore & Guzzle
Ryder Ripps - Internet archaeologist
things - a dead mag, now blog
nothingeverhappenstoyouOssie
For Every Year - a historical short story series (what more do you need?)
20JFG - music, guilty.
Law Think
Gaps in the Dialogue
A Taste for Perfection -...
1 tag
Submit something to gnome? Hit:...
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at gnome, we like ideas.
We are a new online magazine providing a space for quality nonfiction writing by like-minded people. Every week we’ll upload a new feature. These will be essays on any subject under the sun, by thoughtful and funny writers.
Until then you’ll have to make do with my musings on break-up albums. The piece is called ‘How To Sound Good Naked’ and it was inspired by the recent...
2 tags
How To Sound Good Naked: in search of the break-up...
Tree (family)
In 1955, Frank Sinatra - bruised from his romance with Ava Gardner, the great love of his life - recorded his first 12-inch LP, a collection of songs about heartbreak and disappointed desire, wrapped up in Nelson Riddle’s exquisite arrangements. That record, In The Wee Small Hours, did more than any other to invent the concept album, the notion that a record could be more than the...
Resources
A list of places to go when you need something interesting (and for free!)
General
a.aaaarg.org - astounding, expanding and useful collection of academic books and articles
openculture.com - free educational and cultural media
ted.com - outstanding series of video talks by interesting people
omegle.com - talk to strangers, a great resource of anonymous strangers
Suicide machine - delete...