The first hundred days

Ricardo Blanco’s Blog

• Dance in the Rockies
    L-E-V Dance Company is the creation of choreographer Sharon Eyal and co-director Gai Behar. The show they performed at the Banff Centre on Friday night is called OCD Love, a powerful and darkly compelling work. The piece was inspired, writes Sharon Eyal in the programme notes, by a text entitled ‘OCD’ by Neil Hilborn. […]
• The Bear
  The road is empty, straight, the peaks of the Rockies crowning the road ahead. It is early morning and the shadows are long. The bear appears on the left and lumbers across the highway, two hundred yards ahead, glances once towards us, but continues on his way. I pull over, crawl beside the guard rail, […]
• Sympathetic Magic
  What is it that makes me collect these animal models, wherever I go in the world, whether they be hand-carved wooden shapes of exquisite beauty, a water bird sculpted from whale bone, a tatty and cross-eyed Mexican coyote made from God knows what, or these cheap plastic creatures picked up in a Banff tourist store? […]
• Banff journal: on Jaramillo, Borges, and living between languages
  After a long day that a resourceful weather-forecaster might summarise as wet and irritating, my attention depleted by sleeplessness – mood, to continue the meteorological analogy, middling to crabby –  I am due to give a presentation on the topic that brought me here to Banff: my translations of the Colombian poet Darío Jaramillo. This […]
• Cretan threads: Jacqueline Saphra, Tacita Dean, John Craxton, Patrick Leigh Fermor et al.
    It began with a poem, which Bill Herbert used in teaching an MA class at Cardiff last month. The poem was ‘Crete, 1980’ by Jacqueline Saphra, from her collection All My Mad Mothers. I reproduce it here:   I lived on hard-boiled eggs and yogurt with a slug or ten of ouzo as my […]
• Borges and the infinite dance of entropy
  As discussed in a previous post, time is not real. There is no flow: past, present and future cannot be sensibly defined and there is nothing yet to counter the position held by the second law of thermodynamics, namely that entropy – the general disorder of the universe – is always on the increase. Otherwise, […]
• Waylaid by a man-root in the Pyrenees
    As we follow a trail across the Alberas – the lower ranges of the Pyrenees as they dip towards the Mediterranean – I am stopped in my tracks by an outgrowth of woody root-stuff in my path, in the shape of a man. It is quite perfect in form, and the thought crosses my […]
• What if the future determines the present?
  Retrocausality is the ability of the future to influence or alter the present (or of the present to do the same with the past). This is not, I think, to be confused with the fundamentalist protestant idea of predestination, of one’s life being mapped out in advance by an all-knowing God; although it might, at […]
• The unicorns and the ghost in the wall
    I try to imagine what they are thinking, and realise that not even they know this; that perhaps they are not capable of thought. Either that, or their thoughts are concerned with subjects so remote from anything I consider to be ‘thoughts’ as to make any comparison pointless. So instead I concentrate on the […]
• I have wasted my life
    Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow. Down the ravine behind the empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In […]