The writer and editor for three online magazines, Culturedarm, The Shimmering Ostrich, and Tepid Take; a doctoral graduate with a PhD in English literature at the University of York, whose thesis was in the works of James Joyce; and with prior experience writing for online sports publications including Empower-Sport, I am a talented and prolific writer whose work spans the worlds of academia and popular culture, from modernist, postmodernist, and nineteenth-century Russian literature to music, politics, sports, television, and film. My articles have been cited in numerous academic publications, while the piece ‘Themes and References in Joanna Newsom’s Sapokanikan’ was highlighted by Jim Fusilli in The Wall Street Journal.
My album reviews, concert reviews, and regular features, including ‘Behind the Song’, ‘Tracks of the Week’, and ‘Culturedarm’s Songs of the Month’, have been linked and featured by artists, fan pages, and fellow critics. I have interviewed artists and artisans, writers and thinkers, including the American musician Jolie Holland on the release of her acclaimed album Wine Dark Sea.
Articles in the field of literature include ‘Joyce, Nabokov, and Dirty Books: The Publications of Ulysses, Haveth Childers Everywhere, and Lolita’, ‘The Homeric Parallel in Ulysses: Joyce, Nabokov, and Homer in Maps’, ‘English Translations of ‘Funes the Memorious’ by Jorge Luis Borges’, ‘Crimea: A Literary Perspective’, and ‘George RR Martin and the Art of the List’. Among other notable pieces are ‘Clotted Hinderparts and Privy Drains: Game of Thrones and a History of Death on the Toilet’, ‘Beginning with the Beguine: Dances Named in Popular Song’, ‘Pierrot Through the Arts’, ‘Twin Peaks: The Return and Nadine Hurley’s Left Eye’, and ‘On Elaine May’s A New Leaf’.
Joyce is intent on showing through early Church rhetoric how the Christian faith has suffered its own excesses: excommunicated heretics and torn itself apart through a series of schisms owing to convoluted doctrinal disputes which often rest on single letters or clauses; overburdened itself with language; obfuscated and hesitated in its endeavour to appear exact. The closing interpolation to ‘Cyclops’ is an especially nuanced example of waste, as it masks a crucial reference to Saint Patrick in an excess of Biblical allusion. Revealing the fact and the extent of this reference restores the centrality of Bloom within the episode, and identifies Joyce’s stylistic innovation as a synthesis of religion and politics.
— from James Joyce and His Early Church: The Art of Schism and Heresy
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‘Sapokanikan’ doesn’t quite share the fatalism of Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, but nor is it strictly a civil rights song, or a disavowal of the present in the name of a rightful past. Repeatedly enacting departure, it wonders at the nature of change and our inability to coexist; yet despite a note of warning, it is not overly solemn, with a lively social and historical consciousness, and a formal lightness in its fluttering and swelling, in the patterns of Newsom’s voice and the twinkling of the glockenspiel. There are connections within the body of Newsom’s work: Ys too dwelt on the submerged city, and far from being entombed by the song, Greenwich Village and New York beyond are sustained by ‘Sapokanikan’, their burials made bare and invoked as a process of restoration and recovery.
— from ‘Themes and References in Joanna Newsom’s Sapokanikan’
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The January and May 1919 and January 1920 issues of The Little Review were confiscated and burnt. Fearing that the United States government would prosecute The Little Review for obscenity, and that this would effectively prevent the completed novel from finding a publisher in the United States, Pound and John Quinn – a lawyer connected to The Little Review, and a patron of the arts, who had been purchasing Joyce’s Ulysses autograph manuscript – urged the editors to withdraw future Ulysses episodes from publication. Then in September 1920, their fears were realised as an official complaint against the magazine was launched by the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice. The complaint related specifically to the magazine’s publication of ‘Nausicaa’, in which the novel’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom, masturbates while peering at Gerty MacDowell, climaxing in rhythm with the firework display on Sandymount strand.
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We may distinguish between those who die only within or in proximity of the toilet or bathroom, inevitably a fairly typical occurrence; and those who die asquat the toilet seat. Of course, even ‘seat’ may be a misnomer. In an episode from the fourth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, entitled ‘The Weatherman’, Larry David attempts to go to the toilet but – refusing to turn on the bathroom light – doesn’t realise that the toilet seat is up, and thus falls into a potentially perilous position. There are toilet-centric deaths too on the small and big screens […] The point is that we will consider here only those whom we can reasonably suspect to have passed away atop the toilet, in seated position.
— from ‘Clotted Hinderparts and Privy Drains: Game of Thrones and a History of Death on the Toilet’
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There is always the tendency to view Westerns as comments on America, and those searching for McCabe & Mrs. Miller‘s themes have considered both the micro politics which might imbue a frontier town, and the macro politics of laissez-faire capitalism and the slow spread of common law. But like Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), this art piece is a heady dream. The film does not assert the political logic of McCabe’s demise: it is a matter of a wayward character and his fate. Beatty compellingly portrays the switch from overbearing man of action to helpless sensitive, while Christie is at once stern and unstructured, and seductive in swift glances. There is poetry in this: it is the most unfathomable and most unshakeable of Westerns.
— from ‘Capsule Movie Review: McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)’
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A collection of songs without the conceptual underpinnings of her earlier works, on Have You in My Wilderness Julia Holter shifts between salty coastal and sultry urban settings, offering listeners a restless embrace. The palette is effortlessly varied, by turns jazzy, country, and baroque, and keys, strings, synths, and vocals swoop and swirl in often startling juxtapositions, but the record is still characterised by a graceful restraint: these are songs that lilt and teeter on the edge of love, balancing finely between the rush of freedom and the hold of romance. Have You in My Wilderness is Holter at once endearingly approachable and so daring you stumble.
— from ‘Culturedarm’s Albums of the Decade So Far (2010-2018)’