Sometimes in late November the urge to pour Jack Daniels on your breakfast is difficult to resist. Today I biked to Richmond Park & ran up & down the same hill for 20 minutes instead. It’s not Sintra; but there’s a lot of mud & bracken &, on the perimeter path, a fair few hair-thin hoity toity ladies-who-run–East Sheen’s equivalent of ladies-who-lunch. You should see them doing stretches in their technical training clothing & hundred quid shoes. Reading: Last Evenings on Earth. Bolano was exemplary, but I wish he hadn’t written so much about writers & writing. I’d have liked something to do with refrigeration engineers & their world.

Leigh Blackmore’s essay on “anti-consolation” in Light & Nova Swing is up at Scribd.

photo: C Phillips

Complexity, weirdness, characterisations like little stained glass sideshows. Motives don’t need so much defining as presenting in action. Characters do things because they want to. That’s all we know. Equally, the text shows you something because it wants to. I see a book controlled by its own mood swings and emotional surfaces. But then I always do.

A dead girl, six or seven years old, perhaps a cultivar like the one the shadow operators offered Seria Mau, saying: “I’ve got a little secret.”

what can i take to make me feel good

Granite boulders, Sintra, Portugal.

Walking past a car, Sintra.

Specialist roofer, Quinta da Regaleira.

Detail of protection system using a fixed line & descenders.

Rooftop doll, Bica, Lisbon.

Lost & found, Lisbon Portela Airport.

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

Watching: the first series of The Ren & Stimpy Show. C doesn’t get it. I’m not sure I get it myself anymore. What’s funny about watching the lungs of a badly-drawn psychotic chihuahua come out through his mouth ? I don’t know but I started laughing as I wrote that down. Ren & Stimpy’s enactment of “Robin Hoek & Maid Moron” is one of the great epic fantasies of our time, & should have been on the list.

Off to Lisbon for a week tomorrow, back the following Tuesday. What’ll we do til then, Ren ?

Rather than writing, David Constantine seems to perform an act of visualisation on the reader’s behalf; what he makes us see is matter-of-fact but at the same time somehow light, unmoored and thoroughly poetic. His stories are evidence. Everyone in them is a witness, sometimes to a death, more often to a birth; sometimes, to something which is too complicated to describe as either but somehow partakes of both. More.

Watching environmentalism wrong-foot itself to this degree is sad. Now they’re just rolling about on the floor with all the other “narratives”. When everything’s a clash of fantasies, nothing ever gets done. Will postmodernism ever end ? Probably not–too useful to the legal, political & religious professions. But on a more optimistic note, at least string theory (“postmodern physics”) seems to have given up on itself. The universe can go back to being inelegant.

Reading: Irene Nemirovsky, All Our Wordly Goods. Life doesn’t get much better than that. Looking forward to: a nice Indian lunch with Mic Cheetham. As for this, it’s as clear & beautiful as Nemirovsky, & as long as we all use our intelligence to understand what’s going on, it’s the upside of making narratives. It goes well with this, & with Municipal Archive’s whole project.

“What’s your book about, Carlos ?”

“It’s about the romance & holiness & mystery & paradoxical matter-of-factness of all books. & it’s about my struggles with this book, my book, the one you hold in your hand. & it’s about women, the romance & holiness & mystery & paradoxical matter-of-factness of women, & about my struggle with this woman, the woman you–”

“Next.”