My piece in @thelondonmagazine.bsky.social on the way Conrad stalks Hisham Matar's new novel. As writers, they both capture something of London’s duplicity for the outsider – its cold apathy to you on the one hand, and the freedom this affords on the other.

thelondonmagazine.org/article/essa...

I've got an essay on Joseph Conrad & Hisham Matar in the April/May issue of the London Magazine, alongside some other great contributors. You can pre-order it here.

Is there a name for the experience of reading an autobiography and a biography of a writer at the same time? I’m alternating chapters on these two for Stefan Zweig. It’s wonderful - a process I will try with other writers.

I like Lukács's idea that, for a writer, extreme irony is a 'negative Mysticism for godless times.'

‘London is a city of shadows, a city made for shadows, for people who like me who can be here a life-time yet remain as invisible as ghosts.’
––My Friends, Hisham Matar

It's easy to forget that for much of the 19th century, a confident Britain thought of itself as the 'asylum of nations'––a refuge for persecuted people. Only in 1905 was immigration restricted for the first time––primarily to limit the arrival of Eastern European Jews fleeing Tsarist pogroms.

Revisiting Conrad's "The Secret Agent" - set in the anarchist slums of Soho. His London is "a mounstrous town... a devourer of light" full of disorientated immigrants, bombmakers, nihilists, proto-fascists. The novel got a lot of attention after 9/11 but it's much better suited to our age now.

Mysterious, understated music. Few better poems than this when thinking about sound work with students.

He even eulogised his parents in English, which they didn't understand.

'I write this in English because I want to grant them a margin of freedom... English grammar may prove to be a better escape route from the chimneys of the state crematorium than Russian... May English then house my dead.'

Two images keep coming back to me from the night of the Altadena fire. The first is of the dead Christmas trees floating across the road as I scrambled to save what I could from my parents' house. The second is of me locking the door on my way out––the total futility of that.

After seeing this I picked up my old copy of Boym's The Future of Nostalgia and came across this quip from Brodsky:

"To be an exiled writer is like being a dog or a man hurtled into outer space in a capsule (more like a dog, of course than a man, because they will never retrieve you)..."

Greatly looking forward to this––published Thursday.
Sebald's essays on Kafka, Roth, Stifter, Handke, Roth & others, superbly edited, translated & introduced by Jo Catling.
Sebald as critic; Sebald tracing in others the patterns & preoccupations that animate his own extraordinary 'prose fictions'.

Joseph Brodsky said he learned English to please Auden's shadow––which remains, I think, one of the most beautiful descriptions of committing oneself to a second language.