Far South, foul weather
In the south of Chile, early September means late winter, and the weather is cold and damp. This comes as a shock to the system, if your body still thinks it’s summer. Driving from the airport into Valdivia,… Read More
Fiction Fiesta 2015
PREVIEW | FICTION FIESTA 2015 Fiction Fiesta started out three years ago as a conversation in a pub between myself and Nick Davidson, landlord of the now defunct Promised Land in Windsor Place, Cardiff. I was expecting a… Read More
The Pig of Babel
Saltillo has proved the most hospitable and generous city I have visited in Mexico. It seems to be filled with people who love books and actually read them, in spite of being the centre for Mexico’s automobile… Read More
Crossing Patagonia
Writers Chain tour of Argentina & Chile, continued: After three days of readings, lectures and tea parties in Puerto Madryn, Gaiman and Trelew, yesterday we made the long trip across the Patagonian meseta to Trevelin, in the foothills… Read More
Forgetting Chatwin
Day five of the Wales Writers Chain tour of Argentina and Chile. We began in Buenos Aires on Monday, at the Spanish Cultural Centre, where Mererid Hopwood and I gave lectures on, respectively, the Welsh and English literary… Read More
Dissolving
It’s always an education to read in unusual locations. The organizers of FILBA appear to be steering me towards a socially engaged role that I am not normally associated with back in the UK. But that’s fine… Read More
Ricardo Blanco’s Blog
- Ongoingness: Manguso, Didion, WoolfThe 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 MultiverseThere 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
- AmbivalenceI 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 TigerAs 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 chanceSomeone 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 skyReading 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 RockiesL-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 BearThe 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 MagicWhat 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
Ricardo Blanco
