fantasy goods

Further to the unfantastic, there’s this–
Does the object exist? Did it ever? Is something lost, or thrown away or was its possession only a dream? Was materialism itself only a dream of a materiality that existed and was known? Are we now after-materiality, in the virtual, in the almost, but not quite, material, as we [...]

gripped in the vise of use

writers

D reads Proust, enthuses over the economics of increasing returns. Forty five, he worries he can no longer hit the softball out of the park. Maybe age is catching up with him, maybe dope has blurred his memory. But his running & swimming program has been successful, & recently he finished laying a patio using [...]

chicken lagrange

My bet ? What they will find here is the Iron Chicken. Paul McAuley, who has been a Clangers scholar in his time, may have more to say about this at the increasingly interesting Earth & Other Unlikely Worlds. Or he may not. Meanwhile I am carefully sifting evidence from the relevant episodes.

unfantastic

The problem with these items is that none of them is sufficiently “bizarre”. This is a mysteriously 1960s aesthetic. In the 1960s, a stuffed fox was bizarre; now it is only a stuffed fox. & lost umbrellas ? Lost umbrellas are a Victorian index of bizarreness. They are about as bizarre as a caterpillar on [...]

1984

I haven’t posted (& probably won’t, much) because I’m writing. But here’s a bit from a 1984 notebook, which some may recognise in its more written-up form–
We were looking down into a deep Gothic ravine, at the dry bottom of which a well-defined path curved up-hill between overgrown screes. Along the lip of the opposite [...]

the name of the roads

Someone got here yesterday by typing “If you had to name your own city what would you call it ?”
Here at the Ambiente Hotel’s retirement wing, we are all up to competition standard at naming our own city. I’d call it Vertebrast. Dunromin. Muntforby. BHX34. Ball Lock, Donkey Trot, Nostrick or Doakenero-Frote.
No, I’d call it [...]

to the dump

Just finished re-reading: William Kotzwinkle, Fata Morgana. I’ve spent thirty years trying to decide if that book is any good & now I’m going to stop. Next in line: Alfred Kubin, The Other Side. I enjoyed it last time, but I was younger & more physically fit. Re-reads that don’t make the cut go to [...]

deep structures

ideal for contouring

We push up into the hill along the curved track. Welcome it. Put our backs into the last fifty yards. Leaning forward, top out among skyline beeches which you say are like the whole of your childhood. I laugh & say: Was that before the war ? Now the wind’s in our faces, the plantation [...]