Category: Blogging (page 1 of 88)

Day-to-day minutiae.

Back to the Future: Anders Norén’s Hoffman Theme

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.

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Gerald Murnane on not succeeding at meditation

While 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.

I never succeeded in emptying my mind.

Gerald Murnane, Border Districts: A fiction (2017)

My (Northern) Summer Reads for 2024

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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Human Acts: Han Kang receives the Nobel Prize in Literature

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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Anthologised and reprised: “Jetlag World”

The last time a poem of mine appeared in a journal was back in 2013. But in the intervening years, the dim flame of my poetic muse has been sustained by the appearance of some of my published poems in a number of anthologies.

Suddenly, these old poems have a new agency. They just “hit differently” the second (or sometimes even third!) time around. Sure, there’s only five of them, but that’s, like, one every two years. And in the absence of any other kind of engagement with the publishing space, I’ll take those odds.

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