PD Smith

I’ve just read A Phi­los­o­phy of Dirt by Olli Lager­spetz. It’s one of those rare books that are worth read­ing pure­ly for the plea­sure of observ­ing a superbly sub­tle mind at work. Lager­spetz pro­vides a mas­ter class in philo­soph­i­cal think­ing, a lucid and rig­or­ous analy­sis of a com­mon­place notion, one that opens up a new and fas­ci­nat­ing view of dirt “based on our phys­i­cal engage­ment with the world”.

You can read my review at the Guardian.

I’ve been review­ing Owl Sense, by Miri­am Dar­ling­ton. It’s a won­der­ful account of the author’s fas­ci­na­tion with owls and an attempt to re-wild our imag­i­na­tions with some pri­mal owlish­ness. This bird has fea­tured in our myths and reli­gions from the begin­ning: the Chau­vet cave paint­ings dat­ing back to 36,000 BC, include the old­est depic­tion of an owl, an almost life-size ver­sion of a Long-eared Owl, whose pen­e­trat­ing gaze meets those enter­ing the cave: “the artists under­stood some­thing of the Janus nature of the owl, its trou­bling lim­i­nal sta­tus on the bound­aries of light and dark”.

I loved Wim Wen­ders’ exhi­bi­tion of polaroids, Instant Sto­ries, which I saw recent­ly at the Pho­tog­ra­phers’ Gallery. There was a beau­ti­ful line in the exhi­bi­tion by Wen­ders about polaroids:

“You could­n’t help feel­ing
that you had stolen this image-object from the world.
You had trans­ferred a piece of the past into the present.”

Der Him­mel über Berlin (Wings of Desire — the Ger­man title is so much bet­ter) has always been one of my favourite films ever since I saw it at uni­ver­si­ty as a stu­dent of Ger­man.

So for all sorts of rea­sons I was delight­ed to be able to review his col­lec­tion of essays, The Pix­els of Paul Cézanne.

It did­n’t dis­ap­point! Here’s the first para­graph of the review:

Just like the cam­era in Wim Wen­ders’ films, his writ­ing demands the “free­dom to move”: “I need to be able to ‘circle’ an idea”. For this rea­son he choos­es to write in free verse – or what he mod­est­ly refers to as “my odd verse” – for many of the essays in this illu­mi­nat­ing col­lec­tion. In his hands it becomes a play­ful and won­der­ful­ly mal­leable lit­er­ary form that allows him to cre­ate a flow of images and ideas, a kind of rhyth­mic think­ing: “vis­i­ble blocks of thought”. Each line becomes a sep­a­rate track­ing shot as the writer-direc­tor moves rest­less­ly around his sub­ject, words crys­tallis­ing into ideas in the same way as a nar­ra­tive emerges dur­ing the edit­ing of a film.

Read the full review at the Guardian.

I’ve just reviewed Tim­o­thy Mor­ton’s Being Eco­log­i­cal for the Guardian. It’s the first of a reg­u­lar series of non-fic­tion reviews I’ll be doing for the new-look Review sec­tion. I’ll also be review­ing paper­backs as usu­al, so there will be plen­ty of fas­ci­nat­ing non-fic­tion titles to choose from in 2018. Hap­py read­ing!

Mor­ton’s book is full of remark­able insights and ideas — it’s a bril­liant and only occa­sion­al­ly Del­ph­ic dis­play of intel­lec­tu­al pyrotech­nics. He doesn’t offer a plan to make soci­ety more envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly: “the idea of sus­tain­abil­i­ty implies that the sys­tem we now have is worth sus­tain­ing”.

Instead, in what is an inspir­ing­ly ide­al­is­tic book, he wants a par­a­digm shift in our rela­tion­ship to the world and for us all to live the idea that we are “a sym­bi­ot­ic being entan­gled with oth­er sym­bi­ot­ic beings”.

Read the full review here.

I’ve writ­ten a piece for the Guardian about Win­ches­ter to mark the anniver­sary of Jane Austen’s death in the city two hun­dred years ago today. As well as being a very his­toric city, it has links to many oth­er authors, includ­ing John Keats and Thomas Hardy. Even the great detec­tive Sher­lock Holmes trav­elled down by train from the Big Smoke to solve a mys­tery…

You can read my piece here.