Dark Ages
A new poem by Pedro Serrano, translated from the Spanish by Richard Gwyn. DARK AGES The tiger leaps from a cloud of smoke into transience. Falls on the devastating corral with an idleness corresponding to the haste of… Read More
Santa Hemingway
I was walking past this bar, called Revolución de Cuba in Central Cardiff (but seriously), when I spotted this sandwich board on the pavement advertising the venue with a picture of Santa Claus, which on close inspection bore… Read More
A story always tells two stories
‘A story always tells two stories . . . the visible narrative always hides a secret tale’. Attempting an overhaul of my laptop’s photo collection, I come across a picture of Eduardo Halfon, standing across the road from… Read More
The cities within yourself
This has been Turkish week, but also – and with a synchronicity that pleases me very much – Greek week. The London Book Fair had Turkey as its ‘Market Focus’ and two expeditionary groups of Turkish writers descended… Read More
Odds and ends
Here’s a salutary tale. The past few days Blanco’s Blog has gone viral, thanks to the occurrence in a one-off post last summer – a film review of Hobo with a shotgun – of the word penectomy. Shit,… Read More
The Monstrous Encumbrance
I’m not sure if there’s a suitable analogy in human terms, but imagine if ninety-five per cent of your perceptual faculties were concentrated in your snout, and then someone came along and stuck a bloody great fence… Read More
Seasonal Affective Disorder
Having gone out at the beginning of Christmas week and bought a box of a dozen (yes, 12) Krispy Kreme doughnuts and eaten seven (7) of them myself, I feel some changes are overdue. Blanco actually has… Read More
More mind manure plus Dylan Thomas
Here is someone trying to set up house under the bridge that runs between Tudor Street and Taff’s Mead Embankment in Cardiff, known – until the council decided to light it up in pretty colours – as Scary… Read More
Thinking aloud about Borges
A comment on yesterday’s blog gets things churning as I walk the dog this morning along the sunlit banks of the glorious Taf (how lucky we are to have something resembling countryside within walking distance of the centre… Read More
The Promised Land
I have made a couple of references recently to The Promised Land, my favourite bar and hostelry, which can be found in Windsor Place, near the city centre, and which serves, amongst other things, the best coffee in… 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 