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Thursday, 23 January 2020

Some pictures of East Frisia/Ostfriesland

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Thought I might show some piccies I took two days ago. I’ve been dicking around with them to make them look old, but as I say they were actu...
Tuesday, 14 January 2020

Do we actually need writers? And here’s the question: did Wimsatt and Beardsley, and Roland Barthes (who has to be French with a name like that) work as hard was Ernest Miller Hemingway? I bet they did. And I bet they didn’t bullshit quite as much, either

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A few years ago, the following occurred to me (and I shall stick to the art of writing rather than any other art to try to avoid muddying th...
Saturday, 11 January 2020

Building guitars in the back of beyond, in Esterwegen (a nice spot now, but not so nice for some in 1933)

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Heinitzpolder, East Frisia, Germany Well, now settled in for what looks like it will be a month. Simple routine: sleep until whenever, pot...
Monday, 6 January 2020

Germany here I come (as, I hope, is the conclusion of this bloody project of mine)

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Bodmin to London train: Off on my travels again, this time to the Fatherland for a spot of nominal housesitting for my sister. She and my ...
Saturday, 28 December 2019

You ain’t seen nothing yet, sunshine, so do me a favour and fuck nostalgia

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I’ve not posted here for a while and feel my crown slipping, so I thought I might add a few anecdotes about newspapers and folk I have known...
Wednesday, 11 December 2019

Does Britain want to die of liver cancer or bowel cancer? Neither, as it happens, but that is our choice tomorrow when we go to the polls

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It will be of little interest to anyone living outside the Western Hemisphere because many living there have other concerns (and however muc...
Friday, 6 December 2019

Letter (email) to my daughter

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By chance, I came across this, a ‘letter’ (actually an email) to my daughter when she was at the end of her first year at university and unh...
Thursday, 5 December 2019

On the road again, again

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Travelodge – Hellingly Eastbourne, East Sussex It’s a bit of a stretch entitling this entry ‘On the road again’ as it involves neither amp...
Saturday, 2 November 2019

To publish posthumously and squeeze a bit more money for the estate of the writer and his publisher (even though the work might be crap) or not? Decisions, decisions, though as it turned out not a difficult one for Charles Scribner’s Sons, of New York, publishers to the gentry

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Below are around 400 words from Joan Didion’s piece — the opening — on the practice of publishing Hemingway’s work posthumously. It appeared...