Some easter cooking. Fish pie for a friend last Wednesday. Very difficult to get good fish pie out in restaurants so it’s a good one to do yerself, and this was exceptional A+ no further questions. No ard boiled hegg because they don’t like it.
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why do the heathen pray?
i used to do a four song “EP” every couple of weeks or so. stuff i’d be listening to. favourite songs, themed tracks etc. called it “month’s mind”. going to do it again. a diary of sorts. going to try for once a week.
Youtube playlist here:
2022 Redux
2022 has been a bit of a dog.
Alright let me pour this little cognac and break it down for you1 I just discovered that this is in fact a 2021 joint, but you remove it from my significant 2022 listening over my dead body
My conclusion at the end of the year is that I’ve been suffering from a form of anhedonia and chronic, mild/medium, depression. Drink took up more of a role than it should have, I think to tackle the anhedonia, which led to considerable fatigue and ofc probably made the if-that’s-what-it-is anhedonia worse. My social manner was careless, sometimes borderline deplorable, and discouraging to forming new acquaintance, my already middling intellect very weak2 its natural state is C-, it can reach fairly high on occasion, but this year dragged relentlessly at a skiving, bedridden U. It was something of a relief to realise, 2/3rds of the way through that this seems to be a mode i go into from time to time, much of my teenage years for instance, which the natural intellectual ebullience of teenage years mitigated. but as i get older it feels more existential, more a symptom of decay rather than personality, emotions wan to the point of expiry, still protecting a battered and beleaguered heart by rolling up in a ball, cutting cords that should not be cut. Viva Las Vegas.
Continue reading “2022 Redux”MANDATE
- Destroy all cars
- Slates, Slags etc to be played every evening in all pubs
- Resurrecting the corpse of John Dickson Carr to write a few more locked room mysteries. I know he maxed out the 83 possible locked room options but we have the internet and lack of local reality now.
Facts are of the schoolboy’s world
The following section, from Erving Goffman’s essay On Face Work, understood in political terms, is a lot more helpful than explanations provided by those who generally appeal to facts as being a trump card (‘appealing to the referee’, or ‘speaking to the manager’).
Continue reading “Facts are of the schoolboy’s world”More Things Can Happen Than Will Happen
I see a lot of poor decision making and thinking because people, perhaps many people, do not understand the concept ‘more things can happen than will happen.’
Continue reading “More Things Can Happen Than Will Happen”Institutions and Ideologies
On holiday, and re-reading the beginning of Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s The Self Awakened, full of enormously potent and clarifying observations, and often quite intellectually thrilling to read, so much so that it gets my ‘feels too good’ suspicion heuristic going.
Continue reading “Institutions and Ideologies”# January Artefacts
I took a run up at Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson at Christmas but ended up with some small frittering on kindle fragments, bookmarked articles from 2021 and The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter. And some golf game on my phone.
The Void
I’ve been struggling to find my centre. How I can add to the world and let it add to me. Covid has somehow reversed my relation to the world – a place from which I withdrew when I chose, when it was sufficient my mind, before Covid, to a place I am struggling to re-enter, how to reach that level of sufficiency, even though in some respects the daily engagement is the same.
Time to re-engage with the blog. Time to post more cooking entries. Time to write up my notebook, with glosses.
Continue reading “The Void”Sentimental Revolutions
Reading the Blanchot essay From Dread to Language gives me the feeling I get when I read existentialism: that this sort of writing is no more than the fag end of Romanticism. As such there is a a sort of highly decadent awareness of the refinements of Romanticism, such that an entire serious essay can explore the minuscule and rarefied space between dread and language, with meaning.
Continue reading “Sentimental Revolutions”