Ricardo Blanco’s Blog

• Ongoingness: Manguso, Didion, Woolf
  The question of whether or not to keep a diary, or journal, is one that has perplexed me, on and off, for much of my adult life. If you do decide to keep a record of the everyday,... Read More
• Borges and the Multiverse
  There are few ideas more mind-blowing than that of the multiverse, and the notion that the universe is perpetually dividing into parallel universes, each of them containing versions of ourselves. Long before I’d ever heard of the multiverse,... Read More
• A strange, archaic joy . . .
  A few months ago, while on a residency at Banff, in the Canadian Rockies, I wrote about a serendipitous encounter with a black bear. This encounter, however fleeting, and with a distance of fifteen metres or so between... Read More
• Ambivalence
    I love you at ten in the morning, at eleven, at midday. I love you with all my soul and sometimes, on rainy evenings, with all my body. But at two in the afternoon, or at three,... Read More
• Insomnia and the Tasmanian Tiger
  As my insomnia has progressed over the years and has become the norm, rather than a ‘condition’ or illness, I have become expert at dressing in the dark. I seem to ‘see through’ the dark, in the same... Read More
• The cartography of chance
  Someone once told me, and it’s not an unreasonable assumption, that children who spend hours poring over maps are destined to become travellers. I remember spending rainy afternoons immersed in an ancient atlas when I was still very... Read More
• A poem on the sky
    Reading Jean-Christophe Bailly’ The Animal Side, I find this lovely passage about watching a murmur of starlings: ‘ . . . one evening on the Loire and over a period of hours, the perpetual movement of a... Read More
• 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... Read More
• 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,... Read More
• 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... Read More