Cities and Memories
Variations on a theme by Calvino When a man drives a long time through wild regions, his imagination begins to wander. No, that’s not right. Try again. When a man drives across the last continent at night, from… Read More
Dubious categories
In Agota Kristof’s wonderful novel The Third Lie, Claus – or is it Lucas, his anagrammatic twin (the two central characters are indissoluble, or aspects of one and the same person) – spends his nights writing in a notebook…. Read More
Flying Pigs
Pursuing the porcine theme, I recall a couple of weeks spent slumming it in the city of Carcassonne, and being much amused by the legend of Dame Carcas, which goes something like this: In 760, Pepin the Short… Read More
Thinking Pig
Stories of animal transformation abound in myths and folktales across the world. The theme is one that pervades Greek and Celtic mythologies, to take just two examples, and traditionally takes two forms: the ability of a god or… Read More
Juan Rulfo and the terror of the blank page
Juan Rulfo and accomplice. This morning, after a restless night, I spent a couple of hours picking up books from the shelves around my room, almost at random, dipping into them, dropping them on the floor, where… Read More
Killing your darlings
For the past few years, whenever people ask me the dread question of ‘what are you working on’ I have mumbled something about a novel called The Blue Tent. The truth is, I have been writing TBT, on… Read More
Ricardo Blanco’s Blog
- The hill of wild horses and the nature of risk
- Returning to animism in the Anthropocene
- Cwm Banw and the Clowde of Unknowyng
- Cwm Banw and the myth of core identity
- The configuration of confusion
- A day in the high Pyrenees
- The untimely departure of Javier Marías
- Dues serralades
- The Black Mountains and the human brain
- Capel-y-Ffin and the many worlds interpretation
Ricardo Blanco, Citizen of Nowhere
Ricardo Blanco's Blog 