A draft, writing in the way I wish I did more, from sometime in the last two weeks of last year.
2018 has been 12 months I have passed through.
Climbing too much, and adding as much more “too much” on as I can, it’s featured separating from and recombining with Aberdeen*, while continually being amazed the government hasn’t quite collapsed yet with backdrop a Brexit that keeps getting worse all the time, with no end or backstop in sight. My reading has been book ended by the atmospherically haunting sparse style of M John Harrison and the madly allusive hyperdense stream of consciousness of Rodrigo Fresan** meeting in the middle somehow with Simon Ings’ baffling The Smoke which, come to think of it, pulls in aspects of both writers, although I suppose I struggle to verbalise its connection to Harrison beyond “the tension between platonic Yorkshire and London”. (If you enjoy words in pleasing orders, I would recommend Harrison’s “You Should Come With Me Now” & Light trilogy, Ings’ “The Smoke”, anything by Fresan, and maybe “Caroline’s Bikini”, by Kirsty Gunn, whose glorious formalism plays about with “detachment” in some unknown number of quotation marks which is in some cases brilliant.
[A lot of frustration - partially from things I can’t say. (That I have to self-censor due to work does get to me a lot sometimes, and there’s been particular times this year.) There’s a bookending of a pregnancies, I suppose. It’s the year I’ve taken up D&D, with a number of interesting implications]
On the whole, I suppose this year might be mostly summed up to me by the fact that it’s the middle year of an oddly double-length parliamentary session - it’s all within a very gruelling ‘year’ of 2018-20. And it’s marked a decade in London. It was a year. Which unaccountably did not feature an election.
*It’s perhaps telling that this year’s the first time in maybe this decade I’ve picked up a new Discworld book.
**And while I’m pleased that two of his novels have been excellently translated to English, I’ve been waiting for ‘Mantra’ to be translated for five years.
Climbing too much, and adding as much more “too much” on as I can, it’s featured separating from and recombining with Aberdeen*, while continually being amazed the government hasn’t quite collapsed yet with backdrop a Brexit that keeps getting worse all the time, with no end or backstop in sight. My reading has been book ended by the atmospherically haunting sparse style of M John Harrison and the madly allusive hyperdense stream of consciousness of Rodrigo Fresan** meeting in the middle somehow with Simon Ings’ baffling The Smoke which, come to think of it, pulls in aspects of both writers, although I suppose I struggle to verbalise its connection to Harrison beyond “the tension between platonic Yorkshire and London”. (If you enjoy words in pleasing orders, I would recommend Harrison’s “You Should Come With Me Now” & Light trilogy, Ings’ “The Smoke”, anything by Fresan, and maybe “Caroline’s Bikini”, by Kirsty Gunn, whose glorious formalism plays about with “detachment” in some unknown number of quotation marks which is in some cases brilliant.
[A lot of frustration - partially from things I can’t say. (That I have to self-censor due to work does get to me a lot sometimes, and there’s been particular times this year.) There’s a bookending of a pregnancies, I suppose. It’s the year I’ve taken up D&D, with a number of interesting implications]
On the whole, I suppose this year might be mostly summed up to me by the fact that it’s the middle year of an oddly double-length parliamentary session - it’s all within a very gruelling ‘year’ of 2018-20. And it’s marked a decade in London. It was a year. Which unaccountably did not feature an election.
*It’s perhaps telling that this year’s the first time in maybe this decade I’ve picked up a new Discworld book.
**And while I’m pleased that two of his novels have been excellently translated to English, I’ve been waiting for ‘Mantra’ to be translated for five years.