under the dome

My review of it may well be in the Grauniad tomorrow.

all hallows

Yesterday I walked past a shop with a sign in its window, “Buy your complete Halloween outfit here!” & realised I was almost insane with boredom. Everything we have as a society–everything we do–is completely fucking spineless & irrelevant. It’s a “world” with no connection to the world, held in place by the biggest military [...]

short & sad

Somebody landed here today after Googling “describe yourself in a single phrase”. Mine would be: five feet six inches tall.
Reading Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics. Good stuff, but I think a better source of epigrams for the new novel would be Adam Thorpe’s Hodd, which has this: “…a shrieking was heard under the grass [...]

babylon was dust

I can deal with any amount of this, especially when Thomas Metzinger is involved. It reminds me of the absolute best of Charles Williams. The magus Zoroaster, my dead child,/Met his own image/Walking in the garden. You bet.

for your own good, darling

Words like “misanthropic” & “pessimistic” are coded for political meanings then used to dismiss valid positions as the product of bad temper; I always imagine them being spoken in the naice but rather determined tone with which people divert a toddler from behaviour they find unacceptable. It’s a bland & quietly hypocritical technique in the [...]

transvestite SAS 1, ranulph fiennes 0

What can you say ? God knows what state Eddie Izzard’s feet are in. Next: trimming the gangrenous bits off with a hacksaw. Then it’s off to do Everest a couple of times, inappropriately dressed. Respect.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.