Wildfire
We leave the village for a day and the place nearly burns down. Within hours of our departure I receive a text from a friend saying there is a bush fire encircling the village and everyone has been… Read More
An Aleph in my hand
Drove up to the Gers, in France, to visit the brother. It is a four-hour drive in our old Citroën, which starts rattling if required to exceed about 75 mph. It is hot, and the car has no… Read More
The Black Lake of Antonio Machado
El ojo que ves no es ojo porqué tú le veas es ojo porqué te ve. The eye you see is not an eye because you see it but because it sees you. This morning,… Read More
Coetzee’s Foe
‘When I was young there were degrees of certainty’: these words I quoted the other day from Anne Carson evoke a sense of certainty instilled by the repetition of known stories. In childhood, if the world makes… Read More
Translation
All your stories are about yourself, she said, even when they seem to be about other people. I was not going to deny this, nor give her the pleasure of being right. So I quoted Proust, who said that… Read More
The Glass Essay
This morning, with the first light, I read Anne Carson’s long poem The Glass Essay, 38 pages and not a word wasted. Now every line feels engraved in my consciousness. What a rare occurrence this is. I sit… Read More
Walter Benjamin at Portbou
Yesterday an excursion to Portbou and a picnic on a nearby beach to celebrate the birthday of our dear friend Juliette. As usual our large and straggling international party effectively turned a section of the beach into an… Read More
Naked Man with Pit-Bull
Imagine my surprise yesterday, when visiting one of our favourite beaches with friends (where I intended doing a little underwater fish-gazing with mask and snorkel) I spied a naked man washing his pit-bull in the shallows. Bending over… Read More
The Foreigner
The Foreigner – What country is this foreigner from? – I don’t know. – What’s his name? – I don’t know. – What does he do? What language does he speak? – I don’t know. –… Read More
Ricardo Blanco’s Blog
- The continuing recurrent imageA couple of weeks ago, in the town of Figueres, as I was about to cross the road by Plaça Catalunya, I spotted a van which bore a familiar motif. The design was strongly reminiscent of the cover... Read More
- What can a novelist learn from a nomadic reindeer herder?In Wayfinding, by Michael Bond, a fascinating account of how people find their way in and around the world (and the perils of GPS on our innate navigational systems), the author quotes a Siberian reindeer herder on how... Read More
- This One Sky DayIn her new novel, fifteen years in the making, the British-Jamaican author Leone Ross offers the reader an imagined island, like Coleridge’s caverns, measureless to man. The novel, taken as whole, is an infectious celebration of life, and... Read More
- The Indifferent Gaze‘All things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger.’ J.L. Borges The black bear appeared out of the woods to my left and lumbered across the... Read More
- The Welsh language might cause your plane to crashA recent article by travel writer Simon Calder has launched a small blaze of controversy about the use of the Welsh language on aircraft landing in Wales. The offending piece begins: “In the unlikely event you find yourself... Read More
Ricardo Blanco, Citizen of Nowhere
