You click on the link to the publication page and move, without hesitation, into the second person. Somewhere offstage, a gear shifts. Oil lubricates. Your mouse finger follows its heart, caressing the pixels of virtual space, in search of an anchor. The metaphors pile up. Your session time now exceeds the average for the part of the world from which you’ve arrived. From somewhere else, deep in a hidden directory, an image is served. Its filename starts off pleasingly enough but then soils itself, excreting an appendage of digits which only makes sense in a certain light: 20200926-4-7ni594. That first bit could be a date, you reckon. One that’s already passed. Parsed? Past. What comes after the first dash could be anything. Literally, anything.
Of course, it could never last. But the fact that I almost made it through a whole year before changing my WordPress theme gives me some comfort.
Anyone reading this blog would scarcely have noticed in any case but, from where I’m sitting, the choice of theme has some pretty major implications for what I’m able to do with this site.
Read moreWhile I was still a young man, it became fashionable among some of my contemporaries to practice what they called meditation and to read books about a variety of subjects that might have been called collectively Eastern spirituality. I could never have brought myself to read any of that sort of book, but I was sometimes curious about the practice of meditation. On several mornings while my wife and children were still asleep, I sat cross-legged on a patio at the rear of my house in an outer northern suburb of the capital city. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe deeply and evenly. I then tried to perform what I believed was the next part of the process of meditation: I tried to empty my mind of the pictorial imagery and the snatches of songs or melodies that comprised its usual contents. If I could perform this task, so I supposed, then I would find myself in the presence of my mind alone, and I was curious to learn what would be the appearance of a mind devoid of contents: what my mind would prove ultimately to be composed of.
Gerald Murnane, Border Districts: A fiction (2017)
I never succeeded in emptying my mind.
One of the first things I do whenever I move to a new place (trust me, I’ve lived in enough cities, towns and villages to know what I’m talking about here) is to visit — and join — the local library. There’s something comforting and consistent about libraries the world over that grounds me.
Growing up in Australia, the town library was always free to join. The same applied in Sweden, where I lived for 11 years. Sure, you might need to pay a token amount for a late book but if you were interacting with a good librarian — and let’s face it, they’re all good — they’d usually waive it.
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The media frenzy in the lead-up to the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature each year, with groundless speculation on likely winners accompanied by breathless reporting of bookies’ odds, unconsciously skewers the practices of the “literary elite”: a fictional apparatus that only serves the purposes of those who do not read or write.
The decision to award the 2024 prize to Korean novelist 한강 (Han Kang) demonstrates, for me at least, that the Committee values bravery and a commitment to ideals. Her work is extremely difficult to read: not in terms of its “readability”, but rather the devastating way in which she writes about what people are capable of doing to each other.
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