dead lives

I enjoyed very much Mario the Epicurean’s engagement with The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen. It’s so nice to wake up in the morning to a thoughtful piece on a novelist you love. Thanks, Mario, especially for that last quote–
One’s sentiments—call them that—one’s fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: [...]

acts of enclosure

Though not much of a swimmer, I was interested in this until I saw their caps, which reminded me of this. More Acts of Enclosure in the new style, in which an activity open to any human being–going for a swim, going for a paddle, moving for pleasure in a landscape–is repackaged & generously returned [...]

notebook entry, 1993

A Ghost Story–
Ghosts, or fragments of ghosts, phantoms of partial vanished events, appear to have piled up in an old house until its new occupant, A, becomes sensitive to them. She is upset by a particular manifestation. She begins to track it down in local history records, piece it together. With each discovery, more of [...]

gardens

I like gardens, but I suspect them too. Gardens pretend to be outside, but their secret is that they are not. A garden is a place you can’t have, a state that doesn’t exist. It’s a door that won’t open. The sightlines of gardens are designed not to deliver, designed to promise precisely what’s not–precisely [...]

blasim & mckie

Hassan Blasim’s savagely comic stories of Iraq, The Madman of Freedom Square. It’s a short volume, 90-odd pages. At first you receive it with the kind of shocked applause you’d award a fairly transgressive stand-up. You’re quite elated. Then you stop reading it at bedtime. At his best Blasim produces a corrosive mixture of broken [...]

fucked off from you

Someone arrived here yesterday by typing, “I am just fucked off from you” into a search engine. What a great last line that would make.

a single stupid phrase

From a blog conversation last year:
I get [writer's] block but I don’t mind because I figure it’s nature’s way of telling me I’m doing something wrong. Therefore I don’t call it that, either. I’m not going to learn anything by using a cliche to describe an important event in my own experience. Rather than call [...]

staycation

What a grotesque coinage that is. I suspect Hilary Mantel made it up for her satire of faux trade-languages (or faux-trade languages) in Beyond Black.

Listening to: My Aim Is True. Re-reading: Goodbye to Berlin. Eagerly anticipating: Inherent Vice.

creationist day out

Ken MacLeod illustrates this blog entry on creationism with a picture of some people out for a day’s coasteering & DWS-lite somewhere in Pembroke. It’s a pity the photographer has made them seem so wooden. But they’re clearly having a good time.

the voice of reason

After all this time I should know the score. I should know who you are. I should know what we want from one another. I’m sitting here airside, thinking about that. I’m listening to the turbofans the other side of the glass, the grinding manoeuvres out on the tarmac that pass for action, the premeditated [...]