The Fortnightly from Julian Girdham

The Fortnightly from Julian Girdham

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The Fortnightly from Julian Girdham
The Fortnightly from Julian Girdham
The Occasional, issue 2.

The Occasional, issue 2.

Brian Klaas, John Boyne, Victoria Kennefick, Giuseppe Arcimboldo and more.

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Julian Girdham
Aug 03, 2024
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The Fortnightly from Julian Girdham
The Fortnightly from Julian Girdham
The Occasional, issue 2.
1
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Many thanks

to readers who have subscribed since the last issue. Sincere thanks for your encouragement and generosity.

Below the payline after Fluke, I discuss, among other things:

  • Clair Wills’s highly personal history (a useful companion to Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These) Missing Persons.

  • The first two short novels in John Boyne’s The Elements quartet, Earth and Water.

  • Victoria Kennefick’s second poetry collection, egg/shell (her recent essay - Irish Times subscribers - on her the transition of her former husband was very powerful, and she covers this in the book too).

  • plus: NYT books of the 21st century, Conor Murphy on AI in English teaching, Alice Etches on self-checkout machines, African book covers, Michael Longley, reading as an antidote to pessimism and much more more.

The Fortnightly will be back near the end of this month.


Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

is by

Brian Klaas
, whose Substack The Garden of Forking Paths is worth signing-up to. The title of the newsletter explains what the central thesis of his book is: that every moment in our lives is a fork, and that our lives are massively ‘contingent’ rather than ‘convergent’. We have far less control or agency in our destinies than we imagine (that’s a comforting fiction). Klaas is good at using stories to elucidate complex ideas, starting with Henry Stimson and Kyoto, and this book was a thought-provoking read during recent travels in the European sunshine.

A good example of his thinking, in a post called ‘How the World Sped Up’:

The world now moves so fast that we can no longer understand it. Speed creates order and efficiency. But speed has also placed a ticking time bomb under the systems that govern our lives.

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