Blog

  • Allegiance

    Last night, a wonderfully pleasant evening for my sixtieth: eight people at table in a Persian restaurant, then back to mine for ice wine and sweets. ••• (And, as I am thinking now of England, and my English friends, many of whom were around me at that table, I am also suddenly aware that the three grammatical/idiomatic…

  • The Experience of Emotion in the Age of Digital Reproduction

    So, Benjamin's late work!… well, not really. Listening to Tippett string quartets on earphones (earbuds, headphones, headbutts, whatever). Easy access to music of various times and moods, of high quality, doesn't really have such a long history: even in the 1970s LPs, and then cassettes and eventually CDs, represented only a small part of the musics that…

  • At this point

    A sudden bringing-into-awareness, and perhaps into words, of some of what has been going on for me in the past couple of years… in a time of political chaos and anxiety, where one thinks of the 1930s: including the bit where intellectuals were attacked for not being militant enough, not standing up to aggressively dark forces. Attacks that…

  • Glory, glory

    Putting aside a few things, to take the train to Sheffield tomorrow – I am only seeing my analyst live once a month, at the moment – I recall that on my last trip I was looking through all the pockets for a pair of earphones, which had somehow gotten misplaced… Look, here: tangled with older sets of earphones,…

  • Detach

    The past ten days… At first entirely chilly, detached: the election as shock, a worse shock than Brexit of course, but similarly a stupid move towards danger and chaos engendered by incoherent desperation and an extraordinary amount of sheer lying. The US is on the other side of the ocean, and I don't live there… I have…

  • Drawing-in

    From crisp to cold… The past couple of days when I've left the house, it is chilly; I think each time, I need a scarf. A brief hospital visit, the doctor is late, I don't need the x-ray any time soon so I take the request for it with me and walk quickly out and grab the next bus.…

Subscribe

Enter your email below to receive updates.