This may be blank for a while. Blank and exhausted from the cold - just putting one foot in front of the other, maintaining daily life, is harder. But also something new is brewing, probably back on Typepad since I'm sick of Blogger's technical vagaries. A blank slate, as Natalie implies, is often a positive space for innovation.
Discerned through the white-out, some nice links:
For all Sebald fans, Andrew Motion's recent poem, which I love a lot. It's simplicity and intimacy somehow strike just the right note to evoke this much-missed, subtle, complex writer whose published work was never, to my knowledge, simple or intimate - but yet you sense the man behind it...
On Thinkbuddha, a typically lucid and provoking piece on the relationship between meditation, awareness and knowledge.
And a beguiling essay by Professor Lisa Jardine on some ways in which the electronic reader can't replace the printed book.
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For all Sebald fans, Andrew Motion's recent poem, which I love a lot. It's simplicity and intimacy somehow strike just the right note to evoke this much-missed, subtle, complex writer whose published work was never, to my knowledge, simple or intimate - but yet you sense the man behind it...
On Thinkbuddha, a typically lucid and provoking piece on the relationship between meditation, awareness and knowledge.
And a beguiling essay by Professor Lisa Jardine on some ways in which the electronic reader can't replace the printed book.
9 comments:
Jean, yes, the blank canvas is a breathing space, a re-think space, a waiting space, a receptive space.
Wishing you all of that and more.
I have the breathing space allows you to come back refreshed. The photo is beautiful.
Over the worst now, I hope, Jean.
Looking forward to whatever you do next, whenever. And thanks for the links, I haven't seen the poem yet.
Lovely photo! I wish you well with the new space when it happens, and hope you stay warm while enjoying some breathing space! What weather Europe is having! Meanwhile it's so warm and wet here, they've closed some of the ski hills to save the snow for the Olympics!
Thanks for the link to Andrew M's poem. I love Sebald's writing and this is beautiful...
The Andrew Motion poem was lovely, thanks again.
I just wondered Jean, have you tried Blogger's new post editor? I was almost on the point of defecting to Wordpress when I discovered it by chance going through settings a few months ago. It is ever so much quicker and more effective, and there's the possibility of posting photos in extra-large format, which doesn't work for me because I've got too much sidebar gubbins, but would be great for your beautiful photos, and you tend to keep your blog presentation quite simple.
And I hate to say it but Typepad is not so reader-friendly; it takes ages to go from a feed to the blog itself, so I think people are a bit discouraged from doing so, and therefore from commenting. I have to remember to go straight to my blogroll, marking the feed as read, to the Typepad blogs I read, or it's just interminable. And their verification procedures are awful too...
Anyway, sorry if I'm speaking out of turn, but I thought it was worth mentioning it.
Having said all that, I just looked and noted that the New Year Buddha photo must have been posted extra-large, so you probably know about it anyway. Sorry.
Lucy, no, no, I'm glad to have your views and I'm sorry to learn that Typepad blogs don't work well with your feed-reader. I'd never heard that. Wordpress is much better than Typepad, of course, but it's just technically beyond me. Yes, I am using Blogger's new text editor. I installed it with great hopes, but don't find it much better - I still have endless arbitrary blips and problems. As for the photo size, the options are too large or too small for my taste. And I very much want to have 'pages', outside the chronological blog. So on balance I probably will revert to Typepad, as the 'least worst' option.
Blogger just introduced static pages, I heard.
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