Cultivating our garden
This is the time of year when it would be easy for me to fall back on the cliché that “The garden is coming back to life” and yet that isn’t the case at all.
Read the rest of this entry »Wait until next year
Putting off what could be done tomorrow, today
Category: not sport
February 16, 2020
Private mythology
Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one’s conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones.
December 22, 2019
The Christmas Chronicles
Nearly the end of the decade, although it doesn’t feel like it. I can’t tell whether it’s my age, or the age I live in, but this decade doesn’t feel like it has the shape or feel of those of the last century. I’m not sure in thirty years I’ll be able to hear a piece of music or look at a photograph from this time and be able to identify the decade, where I think I could do that with the 1960s or 1980s, say.
Read the rest of this entry »November 6, 2019
Never real
Woodcutters, Thomas Bernhard
There is pretense even in the tense – the narrator is talking to himself, but talks in the second person, so we read “you” rather than “I”, which distances us from him, distances him from himself.
August 16, 2019
Dispatches from a lapsed blogger
I’ve been thinking about one of my old guilty pleasures, one I suspect I’ve talked about before on here, as (nearly) 11 years in I suspect I’ve exhausted all original thoughts or inspirations. And “guilty pleasures” is an odd concept anyway, one I’m pleased that seems to have subsided in recent years, as why should any pleasure really lead to guilt, unless that pleasure is inherently problematic or illegal? Or maybe every pleasure should be guilty? And there was/is also something a little performative about guilty pleasures anyway, the cracked-mirror-image of inverted snobbery, fun dulled by irony, rather than the sheer joy of finding good stuff wherever you might look. Read the rest of this entry »
Wait until next year 