Curious

I mentioned car insurance in passing over at BIB just yesterday. Today I have masses of spam comments related to “auto insurance”. Coincidence?

Mea culpa

I know it has been remarkably quiet around here for the last couple of months.

To be honest, it is not that I have been lacking in inspiration, the problem is that the inspiration has been to write about topics that I find tedious when reading through the draft. It is almost as if the orgasmic explosion of actually getting the words down in some form is the thrill - then I tend to walk away for a couple of minutes and return to something that is lacking in so many areas and a disappointment in general.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to try and rework any of these drafts - my writing style (if there is such a thing) has always tended towards density (maybe the many years of German have compelled me to write in a Teutonic style - even in Czech (in which I am far from proficient at present), a simple presentation ended up as some pseudo-intellectual tripe, full of subordinate clauses, phrasal verbs and general masturbatory case usage). I lack the journalistic clarity and lightness of touch of my contemporaries.

In fact I notice, as I write this, that I still have two drafts waiting for work, one following my holiday in Ireland last June, and the other about Led Zeppelin from November. I can’t even remember what I actually wanted to say any longer, and it is no clearer to me on reading them - I am sure there are points to be made, but they are obfuscated by the unnecessarily dense text and my insistence on using cultural theory buzzwords that I am not entirely sure I understand.

Anyway, I am off for a chocolate brioche and some nuclear-strength Italian coffee to start my day-off off. In the meantime, though, here are a list (again a list) of things that have been interesting me recently:

Geert Mak’s In Europe
Jan Štolba
Mac certification
Goldfrapp’s Seventh tree

Arnold Schwarzenegger

I will be on sabbatical leave from the diary for the next couple of weeks - I am snowed under at work and looking at a computer screen is about the last thing I want to do when I get in in the evening.

Should I end it?

This blog, I mean. I am feeling dramatically uninspired at the moment. Exhaustion, translation, work, and an X-Box 360 have all contributed to this sorry excuse for apathy.

I would have to delete it all, of course, as I worry when I stumble upon un-updated blogs (two links there!), in the same way one wonders about people in the black and white photos for sale at Camden market - who are they, what happened to them, and why were these very personal tokens cast aside?

The Excluded Ones

10/11/2006
Disagreements

Already as soon as it hurt. It arrived almost always behind schedule, yes, but never one dared to ask to him from where. Not to find out something that it wanted to hide itself to itself but by gentleness, not to abruptly alter the so fine balance in which their lives were sustained. Who knows with whom it would walk now. Before they had been happy. It does not do so much. How to draw up with a piece of chalk the exact line that indicates the point of flexion of the things: everything slipped little by little towards the worse thing, without haste. A day, perhaps, began to find its less graceful jokes of the habitual thing, another one realized that was less intelligent of which always it had thought, another one discovered it balder. They wanted to be a modern pair and always they decided tacitly that to leave separately from time to time with its respective friends it would not be a problem. What friends, he asked himself, who had been acquiring to the force the habit to speak with the objects that populated their house. Before it read, but to read is bad because sometimes it makes think, so it finished always in front of waiting for it the television set, if it were possible submerged in some program aid of high tension: that managed to maintain it in a state of well-being near the idiotez, that is, to innocence, out of danger temporarily of the martyrdom of the doubts.

Translated by Mozilla from Los Excluidos

Another six days

without a post. Some parts of the world manage to have a conflict within this timeframe. I can’t even bear to post a couple of sentences. I guess spending a lot of my time at work staring at a screen of text doesn’t particularly help in terms of encouraging me to write. In fact, I even struggle to watch TV of an evening (this used to be my refuge from reality in the evenings). Reading books is almost impossible apart from on the Tube. Even music has dropped off - I listen on the way to work, but not at home any more. Generally I have to go and lay in a darkened room, like a Jane Austen heroine who has had an attack of hysteria.