Oaxaca
What does Oaxaca hold in store for me? According to Mesoamerican tradition, which pays homage to Ometeotl, God of Duality, paradise has already been granted to the human race, but to accede to it personal effort is required…. Read More
John Berger and symmetries
Following the death on the 2nd January of John Berger, a favourite writer and an inspirational human being, I was led to read (or re-read, if the annotations in pencil were truly in my hand, even if my… Read More
Angry in Piraeus
Flicking back through old photographs, I find one taken while returning from an evening out with friends in Istanbul, and passing some wooden-fronted houses in a twisting street, near the shore, that seemed to belong entirely to a world… Read More
The other side of the other
In my last post I mentioned that perennial companion and source of consternation, the other, the doppelganger, the one who walks beside us, both ourselves and not ourselves. I cited the introduction from Orhan Pamuk’s memoir of… Read More
The other who walks alongside us
On the radio this morning the Turkish writer Elif Shafak prepares me for a journey. I am listening to Istanbul, she says, and we share the sounds of the city, which dissolve, eventually into water. ‘Everything in… Read More
Ricardo Blanco’s Blog
- What can a novelist learn from a nomadic reindeer herder?In Wayfinding, by Michael Bond, a fascinating account of how people find their way in and around the world (and the perils of GPS on our innate navigational systems), the author quotes a Siberian reindeer herder on how... Read More
- This One Sky DayIn her new novel, fifteen years in the making, the British-Jamaican author Leone Ross offers the reader an imagined island, like Coleridge’s caverns, measureless to man. The novel, taken as whole, is an infectious celebration of life, and... Read More
- The Indifferent Gaze‘All things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger.’ J.L. Borges The black bear appeared out of the woods to my left and lumbered across the... Read More
- The Welsh language might cause your plane to crashA recent article by travel writer Simon Calder has launched a small blaze of controversy about the use of the Welsh language on aircraft landing in Wales. The offending piece begins: “In the unlikely event you find yourself... Read More
- Not bad for a girl from WalesIn an interview on the BBC News earlier this month, the singer Bonnie Tyler was interviewed by Katty Kay and Christian Fraser, usually an intelligent and benign pair of individuals with whom I have no axe to grind.... Read More
Ricardo Blanco, Citizen of Nowhere
