u/HancisFriggins_

A few of mine, I've just noticed, are: dismal, terrible, pleasant, gather, drift

I'll report it in the morning, once I’ve styled my hair to match the photo on her I.D.

"Draw two lines," she said, "one for when he wears his head, and one for when he holds it."

Am I the only one who has never quite stopped struggling with this one? The contemporary obsession with present tense writing is ugly in its own way but at least it avoids all those ungainly "had beens"

Started randomly re-reading it last night and became instantly glued. The opening chapter in particular is absolutely perfect: a clever, short-tempered posh girl tries to convince her slightly rougher cousins to act in a play she wrote, but they have no interest. Every sentence has a kind of magical clarity and psychological acuity, and the whole thing conjures up childhood so beautifully. The author is just doing everything at an incredibly high level. Most people remember it as an expertly written country house story and character study, but it's also a masterpiece of crystal-clear prose.

McEwan is often dismissed as a purveyor of slop for the middle-classes, and there's truth to this. His recent stuff is hopelessly glib and out-of-touch. But he had a brilliant string of novels when he was younger - Concrete Garden, Comfort of Strangers, Child In Time, all leading up to Atonement. I think Atonement, in an almost Faustian way, made him implausibly rich and famous while destroying his talent. (If you don't believe me about the wealth part, Google the house he lives in). After that, everything he wrote had the same small-souled issue-driven liberal boomer outlook, as though he stopped even knowing how to make a work of art anymore. It's like Bob Dylan after his motorcycle accident in 1966 or something. He lost the holy touch.

But he did make a work of art with Atonement. I think in one hundred years people will still be reading it, and I also think they won't be reading anything else he wrote.

In my opinion he's one of the few essayists alive whose prose is genuinely strange and brilliant and beautiful. But I shared one of his articles recently and all the comments were incredibly negative. "Pretentious" is the most common verdict, which I think always says more about the person using the word than the person it's describing. It reminds me of the wanton aggression towards Martin Amis when he was alive. I'm starting to realise that a lot of people actually detest great prose writers. Maybe it makes them feel insecure or something?

Note: I am not Sam Kriss.

I find myself so tired by the conventions of modern literary fiction that I can barely bring myself to get past page five of any new novel. All these made-up people having made-up conversations interspersed with sterile descriptive prose. I need a break from all that.

Have you read anything recently that plays around with form and content in a way that felt genuinely strange and new? I guess people who did this for me include Bernhardt, Sebald, Joy Williams, maybe early Kevin Barry.

Kind of lofi bedroom pop with unusual vocals would be another way of putting it

It starts 2:13. Basically she thinks that Derren is using some kind of hidden technology. Probably not an earpiece since he specifically asks them to check for one and the environment is quiet (with two people on either side able to look at his ears up close). But possibly some kind of motion sensor in the pen connected to a tactile pad on Derren's body. I think this is a bit complicated.

My initial guess was that there's a hidden element to the trick. Abbie is given a more limited set of options than what we are led to believe. In the next room (which crucially we never see) there are maybe 10-12 cards that she's told by an assistant to choose from. Derren has some kind of thumper device in his pocket with a basic code associated with each image card. So when Abbie starts drawing a boat, he maybe feels three short vibrations, which he knows signals "boat" etc. Would be easy to do for a magician with some rehearsal.

But then I had an even simpler idea. I think this one might the solution. What if there was a break between when Abbie drew the pictures and when Derren gave his performance of "receiving her signals"? While Derren is saying stuff like "big curving lines, like a banana" Abbie has actually already drawn the banana a few minutes before. At some point -- edited out of the final clip -- a short break was called during which Derren was informed about what she'd drawn. So during Derren's actual guessing, Abbie isn't actively drawing the images but sitting in the other room being told to "concentrate" on what she's already drawn. I think this is most likely, but I don't know, maybe it is just a magic pen or something.

The first trick is easy enough to figure out. He gets Judy to say the letter A before secretly scratching it onto the piece of paper, using a gimmick envelope of some kind.

The second and third tricks are significantly more impressive. In the second he gets Richard to think of a street in London apparently on the spot. Despite there being thousands of possible options, Derren slams his hand decisively on Baker Street. My best guess is that this involved some kind of pre-show work where Richard was asked to whittle down his options to 3-4 locations. Derren then made it clear on-air by alluding to "a man in funny clothing" that the answer would be Baker Street, and Richard played along.

This might also explain his relatively subdued response to Derren getting the answer right: because he knows the trick is less amazing than it appears, and perhaps barely even a trick at all. The strongest evidence against this theory is how emphatically Richard insists that they didn't arrange anything beforehand.

The third trick is tough to figure out too. The only clue as to what might be going on is when Derren at one point says "just so that people don't think we prearranged exactly what you were going to think of change your mind a few times..." This strikes me as an odd way of phrasing this command, implying that there WAS in fact some kind of pre-show shenanigans. Basically these last two tricks work by having Derren choose between a few pre-selected options while making it look like he has chosen between thousands.

I'd love to hear your own thoughts

A genuine question

The concept of the song cycle is really cool (forlorn young man wandering through a winter landscape) and I love the opening line. But I just find the songs themselves sort of boring. Am I alone?