Olivia Laing
speaker
938 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 10 Aug
Olivia Laing’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Or am I actually just going to destroy them?
Am I going to exhaust them?
Am I going to find that when I look so hard, there's nothing there at all?
And I found that really interesting.
You say this beautiful line.
So...
be somebody who spends a lot of time sort of hypnotized by books, the eucharistic ingestion of language.
And I wanted you to talk a bit about both the writers that you're attracted to, these sort of spellbinding writers, and then the fear that the university was a place that might in some way destroy your interest in them or destroy them altogether.
I think part of what I found so moving about the book was, you know, when fairly close in age, and I also went to university during that theory period, and passionately loved theory.
And I think the way that theory has been written about subsequently, the sense that it's all been boiled down to the theory wars, people love it or they don't like it, rather than that incredibly exciting feeling of encountering it for the first time and it being...
both a process and something that existed in its own poetic language, especially that, but lots of different.
And also the sense that you have the book and here is this thing that can cut into it and bring back something about the larger world that isn't necessarily put there on purpose even, that isn't necessarily put there by the writer on purpose.
So it's sort of the sense that it's something, a tool that expands the mystery of the book.
Which I don't think is what every teacher you're encountering at UCD or later at Trinity is espousing, but it's the sort of route that you seem to be able to put together for yourself.
So ambivalence is the title and ambivalence is the subject in a lot of ways, but it's also the form.
It's a book that at once constructs its own form and sort of explains your journey towards that form.
It's constructed by way of parataxis.
It's constructed by way of digressions.
And this young bee is somebody who is intensely anxious about their own tendency to think in those ways.
thinks they are thinking wrong and that correct thinking is, what, a deep descent, a continuous mode of thinking, heavily researched.
Showing 681–700 of 938 · page 35 of 47
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