1. I got rid of my home internet connection, which I loathed, and repossessed my brain from Google.
2. I'm writing a lot of music.
3. I'm writing lots of words, and getting together a draft of this, which appears to have found an industrial sponsor.
4. I always used to read quite a lot, but since I killed internet and bought a Kindle things have started getting serious. People recommend things and if I wake up at 4 in the morning, I just read the buggers. In the last few days:
   • Chaves Nogales A sangre y fuego (h/t), the best contemporary Civil War writing out there, apart perhaps from Baroja's Miserias de la guerra. (See also.)
   • The memoirs of the great Argentine poet and toxic dwarf, Yo soy el Diego. I'm not being ironic in the slightest when I say that this is a narrative and above all a linguistic delight: one of his trainers "wouldn't have seen a cow in a bath", "Lo quería el Barcelona, / lo quería River Plei, / Maradona es de Boca, /¡porque gallina no es!", the encounters with Barça president and crook Núñez...
   • Labordeta Memorias de un beduino. Should have considered a career in football with a view to employing Maradona's ghostwriter? A lovely man - ex-pupil FJL agrees - but this is embarrassing.
   • & as an antidote to all that macho stuff, Hitch, splendid queen of the English secular establishment, God is not great.
5. I'm getting out a lot more than in the last few years. Off to see the gent with the 'toos Friday night:
   

Work's still going fine and no ear op date yet, since you ask. I think the surgeon's off skiing again, and I'm getting so used to singing in public without being able to hear very much at all that, with summer coming up, I'm wondering whether I shouldn't postpone.

Tags & auto-cached WP extracts:

• José Antonio Labordeta (1) José Antonio Labordeta Subías, described by The Gran Enciclopedia Aragonesa 2000 as “The most important Aragonese singer-songwriter”, began singing in an attempt to give more relevance to his poetry.
• Josep Lluís Núñez (1) Josep Lluís Núñez i Clemente was president of FC Barcelona between 1978 and 2000.
• Manuel Chaves Nogales (2) Manuel Chaves Nogales was a Spanish journalist and writer, an enthusiastic supporter of the Second Spanish Republic and friend of the new President Manuel Azaña.

RSS: post comments / blog comments / blog posts / email / Twitter

You can leave a response or trackback from your site.