journals

Fiction may struggle to hold us spellbound in the manner of music, but its prompting of more diverted states of mind, and its depictions of the richness and freedom found in the sloppiness of drifting thought, suggests how constricted a world can be that treats attention as its own end.
---The New Yorker.

~~~

anton drew my attention to this and, as always, I'm indebted to her for sharing stuff she's interested in. 

The little book fair in the main courtyard on a cold and dry morning was a disappointment-not that you need any more books, but I suppose you're always hoping to stumble across something, some book or sentence that will do..what, precisely? Illuminate your thoughts, somehow throw some weight behind them, or offer a new perspective?

In ten days is the real thing, towards the ring road, out in the backwaters, past the railroad tracks, shanty town, 'Namak' restaurant and towards the cancer hospital.

Why journals and their intimate private small world? I think we look for a literary form that resonates with the times we're living in, a shape and style that is less constructed, less concerned with plot and that can dispense with all that bagginess and inessential detail. But one that also avoids the coldness, fake cleverness and 'fragmentariness' of sharp sentences.

 Not a story, in the old sense of some magical fabrication, but a personal story in which quiet moments of reflection emerge naturally from a life that is lived-if not to the full, for such a thing is not possible, but from a life that is not superficial. 

And when you think about it, that's why you like John Burnside's Spell book so much: the quality of the writing is a reflection of a generous spirit, and not merely the distillation- through years of a mind tortured and tutored by institutions- of the ideas or "thought" of an academic or an intellectual who aims to put a spell on you with his narrow, obscure, dry-as-dust abstractions and second-hand marginalia.

Private, personal, small-scale meandering impressions have their own kind of glamour, out of the dazzling glare of the world, that is the world.