End of one road, the start of the next
I went for a run today, as I had this nagging feeling that I needed to feel a kind of physical exhaustion to match my mental one as the year, and the decade, drew to a close.
Read the rest of this entry »Wait until next year
Putting off what could be done tomorrow, today
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 »
February 16, 2019
Misrememberings (Rye Harbour)
“Let’s go wait out in the fields with the ones we love.” – Heavenfaced, The National
“Civilisation still seems to be an unfinished task.” – Robert Walser
“It is necessary to be embarrassed a 1000 times to produce a good work. Get used to being embarrassed.” – John Berger
Wait until next year 