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Or a reader might raise his head from the book. He sits on a bed in a tiny bedroom surrounded by paperbacks. He thinks: I sit here reading about adventure; why don’t I walk out the door? Sometimes he has spent too long in the land of the lotus-eaters; he takes a step to the door, picks up another b…

[...] Quenya and Sindarin (two Elvish languages) are the only two which are useable—that is, it is possible to write in them if you don’t want to talk about credit derivatives or leather fetish lesbian triangles. Tolkien did not provide a comprehensive grammar and vocabulary of every language spoke…

It’s not that I think children should be seen and not heard. Why stop at children? How many adults generate utterances equivalent to the paragraph of Spinoza one could have read in the time taken up by the utterance? Chances are the utterances of Spinoza himself would not have achieved equivalence,…

You’re just a Bolshevik, you’re a theory nerd, you’re an avant-garde situationist manquée. Your view is that your stepma was behind the times. You read Kathy Acker, you warmed to Blood and Guts in High School, you think your stepma should have published a limited edition of 100, preferably in matte…

I still came from Dublin and my name was still Richard. I had been trying to get into one of the 362 struggling Dublin boy bands, but my problem was I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to be the cute one or the moody one. Because of the intense competition you had to start specialising very young; t…