Ricardo Blanco's Blog

Ricardo Blanco’s Blog

• 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
• 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... Read More
• 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:... Read More
• 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,... Read More
• 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,... Read More