It will be common knowledge for anyone who has dipped into my store of blogs that I like writing in cafes. They may even know that I edited a book called ‘Café Society’ with Norwegian colleague and friend Aksel Tjora. Well, after travelling around Dorking’s expanding repertoire of cafes over the last twenty years, I… Read More »
I have frequently commented on cafes and on the facility they offer me to write. Oddly I have had far less to say about bookshops. It is time to make good this deficit. My family will confirm that I am rarely to be seen without a book about my person, and that I’ve been known… Read More »
While reading Hemingway’s engaging memoir of life in Paris (A Moveable Feast) in the 1920s I came across a passage that struck a cord, though I hope I have more patience than Hemingway – he of the notoriously short fuse – had available to him. When he was writing in a Parisian café, deep in… Read More »
I have not always or only worked in cafes. As Aksel Tjora and I construct a proposal for a companion volume to our Café Society, to be entitled Bar Society, it is only appropriate that I come clean and acknowledge that at a certain time of day I can be seen escorting my laptop …… Read More »
Laurie Taylor. Copyright BBC Radio 4 History of Surfing; Coffee Shops and Idleness Duration: 28 minutes First broadcast: Wednesday 25 June 2014 Surfing – a political history. Laurie Taylor looks beyond the tanned bodies, crashing waves and carefree pleasure, talking to Scott Laderman, Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. His study traces… Read More »
Oslo’s cafe scene is well covered in Café Society, which I co-edited recently with Aksel Tjora, so I will not trespass on ground covered elsewhere. Instead, this is a personal piece, garnered from a working trip to see Dag Album and colleagues in November of 2013. Annette and I sampled several cafes, from the luxurious… Read More »
There are cafes outside the normal run. They make a mark and become cultural signifiers. I have lucky enough to sample a few. Café Dorian in Venice I might return to; Oslo’s Grand Café, visited in November 2013, is another. But this blog is committed to another historic space, Vienna’s Café Central. I had long… Read More »
The phrase ‘café society’, the title of a book in press, has for me always pointed to a form of bounded sociability. It is a classic example of what Oldenburg calls a ‘third place’. Revisiting C Wright Mills’ The Power Elite, however, I discovered an alternative and quite different meaning. In the course of his… Read More »
Some papers have long periods of gestation as other projects sidle by. This belated new post yields more background material. It outlines two typologies: of (a) the material and (b) the social spaces of contemporary cafes in London and elsewhere. These set parameters for the ongoing discussion of virtual as well as actual relations. They… Read More »
Already I have had feedback – including the tweeting of a link to a paper I had not been aware of – for which many thanks. There’s an issue of authorship here. It was never my intention to profit quietly from the suggestions, guidance or insights of colleagues. Multi-authorship maybe, or a novel form of… Read More »