The beginning: A man called Ben, separated from his wife, has come to Greece for three months to get away from his life in Oxford. For a while he works at a meat grill in Athens, but a chance meeting with a colleague gets him a job on an excavation at Sparta, an excavation populated with a group of strange, unfriendly, exclusive people. The end (no spoilers): I had it in my head that this book was like a cross between a Carol Goodman novel and The Secret History. The eternity Ben spends in Athens as a waiter or whatever…
16 CommentsReading the End Posts
The beginning: An unnamed narrator and his flatmate Ruby come home one day to find that a girl has died outside of their squat. “What it needs now,” says Ruby, “is for the radio to start playing ‘You’re Sixteen, You’re Beautiful, and You’re Mine.’” “Yes,” I agree. “If that was to happen it would be immensely poignant.” But when I switch on the radio the only station we can find is broadcasting a report from the Tokyo stock market instead, and no matter how we try we cannot work this up into any really effective kind of…
18 CommentsI love a taxonomy, particularly a philosophical taxonomy, although I am not fond of philosophy. One of my favorite bits of my high school philosophy class was when we talked about Aristotle’s ideas about the four different types of causes (material, efficient, formal, and telic/final). Peter Rabin incorporates and expands upon the Aristotelian model, pulling in ideas about causation from Galileo and Kant and other thinkers from history, to produce a complicated (but well-articulated) set of models for thinking about cause. His thinking accounts for a wide variety of causes, from straightforward, yes/no (what he calls categorical) causes like A…
5 CommentsThis week we’re here to talk about some amazing Harry Potter news, depictions of food in books, and Pamela Erens’s new novel The Virgins (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository), and play a game of guessing where movies came from. You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below or download the file directly to take with you on the go. Episode 8 Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We will appreciate it very very much). If you want to skip around, here…
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