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
- Tlön, Uqbar, and the girl in the moonHaving fallen ill on the last day of teaching, the accumulated tensions of the semester finally erupting in an onslaught of snot, fever, and a hideous, raucous cough, I take to my bed in the hope... Read More
- 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
Ricardo Blanco
