psychogeography | Wait until next year

I spend too much time looking at commons images. The images you can use and share without worrying about copyright or payment. They can improve a piece of writing and can sometimes offer an inspiration. They are generally one of the internet’s better rabbit holes, a glimpse into the past but also an alternate history, a motley collection of professional and amateur photography, strange illustrations from stranger books, carvings, engravings, lithographs, screengrabs. A world once there, a world gone, a world never known about.

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December 22, 2016

street/library

There is a library I visit which is in the bowels of a big corporate building. You have to go down several flights of stairs, or take the lift, to enter. Libraries feel like an escape from the real world at the best of times. Heading underground makes that escape feel even more pronounced. Then there are the books to take you even further away. I’m sure the library sitting under a temple of commerce and capitalism says something too, but I wonder if it might be a little too trite or tidy to point that out too explicitly. We can all make our own conclusions there. Read the rest of this entry »

They just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness.

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

A few weeks back we went on a camping holiday, down to the coast. My holiday reading was W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. Both had quite an effect on me. Read the rest of this entry »

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