River houses float in light. Looking back along the reach from Chiswick to Barnes you’re thrown out of context & might be anywhere but London, any age but now. This makes you, for an instant, fully human. Whatever that might be. Imagine for a second being genuinely free, not having to participate except through flare & dazzle. You can see why romantic & ecstatic alike busy themselves around this moment of recognition. & why gnostics don’t trust it at all. Later I’m tempted to write a sonnet on Hammersmith Bridge, but S is impatient to get down from there. “It’s a bit Victorian for me, this whole architecture.”
I didn’t know I was in this promotion. Interesting cover. Have they decided to drop the definite article from the title ? Interesting decision. But I still hate the book. Whereas I love this more than I can say & want to have its babies.
Reading: Denis Johnson, Seek.
Good. This helps. Thanks. It explains a look, a posture, a tone of my brother that I never quite understood. He once bought a tired old barge, stripped and cored it, moored it by Tower Bridge, and lived – truely lived – in it for a couple of years. He was in pure flow (Csíkszentmihályi) and I aimed a quiet brother-envy at him. Then he got bored, married and now rents in Beaconsfield. I wonder where his flare ‘n’ dazzle is kept. The nappy-bag maybe…
I hate not having control over covers. It’s like someone else choosing your face for you.
You were also namechecked in a recent Q&A session about the future of SF:
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/007318.html
Apparently, Nova Swing is assimilating the snobbish…
I don’t know much about the sfsignal, but the answers seem about what you’d expect from a website with a Star Wars video game on its front page. Thought you might be interested though.