Category: Books
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Dark pasts
A couple of weeks ago – Saturday – D. and I went to see Matthew Bourne's The Midnight Bell. Based on books by Patrick Hamilton, who wrote a lot about being down and out and drunk in London in the 1930s (and died in his fifties, predictably of deterioration after a life of drinking), it's…
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Sea, sea
Reading David Hinton's Existence, which is, among other things, Hinton looking at a Chinese painting that leads him into the world of Chinese thinking – that thinking which developed across Taoism, Zen Buddhism, etc. He speaks for a while of mountains, and the Chinese sense that the awareness of existence, emptiness, and a lot of…
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Refound
An unexpected rediscovery…. A new masters student wanted to talk about archetypes and music – she is composing a set of songs, she came over on her bike today, when it was cold and windy, when trash had blown onto my front porch. I showed her a pile of books and gave her a video…
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Crossing
Crossing from one year to the next…. This year has been one of separations and endings. In fact, more than ever in my life, I've made many breaks – but without having to do so, and at my own speed. As I am someone who has, many times, suddenly leapt or been driven from one…
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[Essaying] Bloggisization
Brian Dillon, Essayism. He writes beautifully, and has become famous by doing it. Actually I'd never heard of him until I started noticing those Fitzcarraldo Editions – are they named for somebody involved, or for Herzog's strange movie, and the man the movie is about, played by the mad Kinski? – it's probably about the…
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Mood [partly reconstituted]
[A post drafted in late November 2020; I have moved on from these things, a bit… and incidentally am now firmly of age, at 64. I apologize for the fragmentation: unfinished work, with later attempts to recapture some of the original content, and then some scraps of things I wanted to talk about – two…
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Last day of….
It is, approximately, the last warm day (or, the "last," "warm" day). Which means that today was in the low 70s – warm for the North Sea – and tomorrow is a fading version of the same, without sun. Then we drop to fall temperatures. Sometimes we have a burst of late summer at the…
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Ah, I’m getting it now
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home. Yes, it's thirteen years old now, and was actually turned into a stage show… what can I say, I'm behind the times. I've just read it. *** The blurbs treated it as complex and subtle and unexpected: by the time I was a bit less than halfway through, I was pleased,…
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Things
A time of flickering changes, referents – going through books, CDs, tech, implements and bowls and glasses, my office at school, my office at home, the living room, the kitchen: the world of things. There are burdens here, and entanglements – I am approximately as good at letting go the world of things as I…
Paul Attinello 