"My only objection [to the coverage of le Carré's death] would be: not enough discussion about the relationship between le Carré’s greatest character, George Smiley, and his wife, Ann, which plays out over the five novels where George Smiley appears as a central figure and is one of the weirdest portraits of a marriage ever committed to the page. The reasons for this omission are most likely either boring (something to do with expectations of the genre) or depressing (something to do with ambient contempt for women), but it’s nice to think that le Carré’s portrayal of their marriage is not given the attention it is due because it is so strange, to the degree that if you start talking about it you will never stop."

Every time I try to quote this I end up reading the whole thing again. For Gawker's "Famous Cuckolds" series, Rosa Lyster looks at George and Ann Smiley. It's a wonderful piece of writing about a wonderful writer, and about wonderful writing.

I viscerally resonated with the way just the thought of having to deal with other people's opinions can make one feel, especially now. Turks and Caicos, indeed.

Anyhow. Not a waste word, and you get the added bonus of remembering le Carré's own words as you read. Cannot recommend this enough.

"In The Wave in the Mind, one of Le Guin’s many collections of essays, she wrote, ‘All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people.’ When I met Le Guin, I was in outer space, hovering in that darkness. Cast out from my homeworld, I spent my days orbiting a new world, afraid to land." This is great.

"In an interview excerpted in The Advance Guard of the Avant-garde, he says that ‘the randomness of the material was directly in conflict with the book as a technological object’. We hope that by using the randomness available to us in a new technological object, we have created a treatment of the work that Johnson would have felt does the material justice." IRFS on their version of _The Unfortunates_ for Alexa – an idea I have a tiny hand in prompting into existence. There's so much frustrating about developing creative content for smart speakers, but this feels like a strong fit between the source material – a radio play in fragments – and the technology – a speaker that is also a computer. Henry's writeup is strong.

"I’m especially intrigued by reader reviews written by people unfamiliar with the vocabulary of literary criticism. They aim to describe experiences that most of us recognize but that can be hard to articulate, and they have to make up the language for it as they go along." This is a great article on the various assets of reader-reviews, and where they set on the spectrum of criticism.

"The Unfortunates" as a kind of promenade; marvellous.

Really strong piece by Craig Mod on Worldreader and their achievements, focusing on a school in Ghana.

"Here are ‘the obsolete industrial plants; the inadequacy of unchanged transport systems and overstrained power supplies … the shift of power from industrial capital to international finance capital’ and so on. Here is the self-consciously world-historical Lowry, showing us Britain mired in its past, and perhaps the future of China. But here and there is the old local Lowry, whose people cannot see beyond the foreground terraces to the dystopian prospect, and so seem to manage, to cope, even to enjoy themselves, on their own tight patch. People stop to chat or just to stand about; kids play; dogs and babies get taken for walks; women wear bright vermilion, the happy colour of the summer of 2013, and apparently of 1950 too. It’s hard to say this without sounding as folksy as Brian and Michael, and perhaps that’s exactly what it is, but right now what I most admire and enjoy about Lowry is the interest he shows, without any apparent agenda, in what people do. I have no idea why that should be so moving." Wonderful article from this fortnight's LRB about the Lowry retrospective at Tate Britain.

"Coming up with a word like neuromancer is something that would earn you a really fine vacation if you worked in an ad agency. It was a kind of booby-trapped portmanteau that contained considerable potential for cognitive dissonance, that pleasurable buzz of feeling slightly unsettled." There is so, so much in this interview, that quoting it feels somewhat futile. It's a really lovely thing piece, that goes far beyond cyberpunk, and delves deep into Gibson's writing and history. There are at least five meaty quotes I wanted to yank; it's worth reading and rereading.

David Markson left all the books he owned to New York's Strand bookshop; now, they are likely further spread. This blog collects annotations and commentary that people have found in books previously belonging to Markson. Brilliant.

"Melville’s searing, wayward novel about obsession and the nature of evil becomes a twin-stick shooter for consoles. The twist? The playing field is 5000 miles wide, and there’s only one enemy." Christian is brilliant. (I'm pretty sure my links are full of 'Christian is brilliant' annotations)

"Or, in a diffirent formulation of the legendary author of Sim games Will Wright, "Playing the game is a continuous loop between the user (viewing the outcomes and inputting decisions) and the computer (calculating outcomes and displaying them back to the user). The user is trying to build a mental model of the computer model.""

"When another scholar worries that if one begins with data, one can “go anywhere,” Ramsay makes it clear that going anywhere is exactly what he wants to encourage. The critical acts he values are not directed at achieving closure by arriving at a meaning; they are, he says, “ludic” and they are “distinguished … by a refusal to declare meaning in any form.” The right question to propose “is not ‘What does the text mean?’ but, rather, ‘How do we ensure that it keeps on meaning’ — how … can we ensure that our engagement with the text is deep, multifaceted, and prolonged?”" Which is interesting, as is the whole article – the author is not convinced by the 'digital humanities', but he still links to some very interesting stuff about algorithmic criticism.