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 [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘the horror’
October 26, 2009
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 [...]
October 14, 2009
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.
October 7, 2009
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 [...]
September 15, 2009
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.
August 28, 2009
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 [...]
August 21, 2009
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 [...]
August 18, 2009
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 [...]
August 15, 2009
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.
August 8, 2009
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 [...]
