we are an enduring lot

Elsewhere, stands of scrub had overgrown the old walls to make intimate sunken bays floored with turf. They looked like rooms in the intimacy of the western sun. You felt instantly calm. You felt instantly at home, until what you thought was a chalk bank, cut deeply by the footpath, revealed ends of brick. It [...]

harission bag

Somebody arrived here yesterday by typing Harission Bag into Google. Computers may have a future after all.

unmoored in space & time

WG Sebald, “Ambros Adelwarth”:
“At this point, Ambros’s entries continue regardless of the dates in his diary. No one, he writes, could conceive of such a city … Every walk full of surprises, and indeed of alarm. The prospects change like the scenes in a play. One street lined with palatial buildings ends at a ravine. [...]

dredge

You have to look at the major transitions of your life with a metaphor that makes aesthetic and emotional sense. That metaphor has to be waiting there in your unconscious to become available to you. You might be offered any number of public metaphors, but only the private one is of use.

What parts of the [...]

naked & singular

New Scientist on naked black holes: “For all we know, the singularity could be spitting out an apple pie, or an orchestra playing Beethoven’s ninth symphony…” I always felt it would be more like Toon Town in Who Killed Roger Rabbit ?; or a combination of that and the Brothers Quay.

usually a little shorter

WG Sebald, Austerlitz: “…Evan told tales of the dead… who knew they had been cheated of what was due to them and tried to return to life. If you had an eye for them they were to be seen quite often, said Evan. At first glance they seemed to be normal people, but when you [...]

psst! don’t tell anyone this

The Indie gives Benjamin Barber a push & passes along his core message: things are fucked but when we say that we must be careful not to offend anybody, or actually catch their attention.

settling the world

Interesting look at Stand on Zanzibar at Torque Control. A book about its own present. My feeling in 1969 was that Brunner’s statement of the problem was a more effective appeal to people’s intelligence than any faked-up solution he could provide. But to electrify is never enough: sf so yearns to provide a cure for [...]

sightline

Landscape was the resource of my childhood. I love the light on the world, the look of things. I love any writer who has a sightline on that, even Kipling. To Yeats or Arthur Machen the light on the landscape was a promise of immanence, something more than the world; whereas to Robert Macfarlane the [...]

the rime of the ancient imagista

“Today only bad actors can lead a nation, as Reagan and Blair showed. Poor Gordon Brown needs six months at Rada and a tryout at the Old Vic.” JG Ballard, quoted in James Campbell’s piece in the Guardian. But also, of himself: “Just because you’re right, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be viewed with great [...]