Not-reading, not-writing and not-watching-films
I haven’t been reading much recently, or watching many films. Hence the lack of blog-posts. I have also been doing a drastically small amount of writing, which is a bit depressing. Nevertheless, I’m hopeful that things will pick up.
Of what I have read, JG Ballard’s The Drought was by far the highest quality. The only writer I can think of who seems to have created his own genre. Ballardian. Bleak, apocalyptic, but also strangely positive. I also re-read In a Country of Mothers by A.M. Homes (why all the writers who publish using their initials, I hear you ask? I’m not sure). Homes writes intricate realism, the type of which you see displayed by the likes of Ian McEwan (except set in America), and the sort of writing about which I am insanely jealous. Aside from these two books, I have pretty much been sustaining myself using my subscription to Stack (Google it, I can’t be bothered with links), which this month provided two excellent magazines Article and Oh Comely (Google them, too).
Aside from not-reading, not-writing and not-watching-films, I have mainly been painting. The bathroom first, after wallpapering it, followed by the stairway. Tomorrow we are having carpets installed on the stairs, which feels quite middle class. The next home-improvements shall come in the form of a flurry of putting up shelving. We need to rid ourselves of the two Billy bookcases which have propped up all of our reading material for the past four years. Considering how cheap they were, I find it amazing that they’ve survived all this time. They’re flimsy and dented and they have a variety of holes in them, but they’re still standing, even after three moves.
Unfortunately, I’m not going to be able to put up enough shelves to hold all of the books, so some are having to go. This has been another job, sifting through the collection and weeding out those that are dispensable. I formed an Amazon storefront for about fifteen books, and I’ve lost money on nearly all of them so far. This is because I have been selling them for a penny, in the hope that I will gain profit from the postage. I haven’t. What an idiot.
So, life has been fairly busy. A few weeks back, Abi and I went to Camden to see the Hot Club of Cowtown (Google, Google…) at Dingwalls. It was the best gig I have ever been to. If we end up going to see them again, I will personally insist that everyone comes with us.
