Mark Charan Newton

A performance artist hangs in statuesque pose. Knee bent. Upside down. The pose of the famously pictured man on 9/11. And this artist is effectively frozen in time. Which is the metaphor at the heart of Don Delillo’s latest novel, Falling Man. That of a moment in time so frozen, so embedded in characters minds, [...]

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Buy an Ent leaf.
Tolkien fans everywhere will soon be able to buy into a legend by subscribing to the public appeal to finance a sculpture celebrating the internationally acclaimed author and his Birmingham roots. From October 1st, courtesy of eBay, fans can bid for a metal leaf with a personalised dedication and associate themselves with [...]

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If you excuse the nervousness of the guy introducing, this is pretty good. I didn’t know Lethem had a Philip K. Dick tattoo. Cool. But not as cool my Led Zeppelin one.
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Another reason that DeLillo is the finest writer alive. I might do more of these.
They wrote for roughly twenty minutes and then each, in turn, read aloud what he or she had written. Sometimes it scared her, the first signs of halting response, the losses and failings, the grim prefigurings that issued now and then [...]

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This is an interesting one. The Fortress of Solitude is a book that’s difficult to catagorise. With brief genre moments, and certainly many nods towards SF / comic book fandom, it describes the lives of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. One white, one black, both growing up in Brooklyn. Not a simple friendship.
The [...]

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In case you wanted to know where any kind of disaster is in the world. All sorts of hazards for the morbidly curious. Actually quite interesting, after you get over the paranoia of how fragile things are. And if you are that type of person you might find yourself the lead character in this.
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Because it’s evening, and I’m in one of those moods. If you’ve never heard Kind of Blue, you’ve never relaxed. That’s a fact. Look at the drummer on this video, the very essence of cool, all suited with glances this way and that, on [...]

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I’m going through a phase where I love abandoned buildings. And there are a lot of them around. They’ve got some strange romance about them. A lost time. A building that says, ‘I was once great, and now look at me. I wasn’t always like this. I used to mean something.’ It’s pretty humbling. Your [...]

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And for real guitar geeks, the tuning is DGDGAD—traditional folk. It’s about time Folk made it again. Are we in 1969 yet?
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Is it wrong to be into such geekery as this as reported here? And there’s this too. I mean, I was just as bad when the iPhone came out. Is it wrong to watch the keynote speech twice? Anyone who just uses PCs may as well look away. Ever since I turned to worship at [...]

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