18 December 2022

Where to find me on Mastodon

Since Elon Musk is trying to ban any mention of Mastodon on Twitter, I thought I'd just make it as easy as possible to find me on the former.  I'm at 

I look forward to meeting lots of you there, where we can discuss the continuing and inevitable decline of Twitter under Musk.

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13 January 2021

Doing the Business: a novel about the office

Back in November, during the UK's second lockdown, I put online my novel about travel and tourism – "Egyptian Romance" – since it was the closest I or most people would get to visiting these or any other places.  As we enter the third UK lockdown, I thought I'd post the novel I wrote afterwards, about another activity that is now similarly rare and exotic: working in an office.

"Doing the Business" is about the particular social dynamics of the office, specifically within a magazine publishing company.  It is even more archaeological, because it describes how magazines were produced before computers.  But its main themes are gloire and amour, which I hope will provide a little distraction, just as they have down the centuries...

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01 January 2021

Glanglish, and other Weekly Essays

In 1990, before I had a go at writing a couple of novels, I put together Glanglish, a collection of short essays.  They are about nothing in particular, and were more in the nature of five-finger exercises for my writing (and thinking).  I aim to post one a week, which I'll add to the list below.

Glanglish

The weekly essay - with audio
Chiral asymmetries - with audio
Wallpaper - with audio
The knife's deity - with audio
Ludwig van who? - with audio
Rubbish - with audio
The new Jesuits - with audio
Systemic dis-ease - with audio
Weird messages - with audio
Looking at glass - with audio
Placing words in English - with audio
The plane truth - with audio
Meta-physicality - with audio
Accidents and substance - with audio
Colonising names - with audio
The crown in the jewel - with audio
The Turing point - with audio
Thoughts for your pennies - with audio
Repeatability - with audio
Intraviewing - with audio
Socratic wisdom - with audio
Invisible royalty - with audio
The oscillating universe - with audio
Digital reality - with audio
Forever Eden - with audio
Pravda - with audio
Glanglish - with audio
Scarlatti's cat - with audio
The check-out - with audio
The finite brain - with audio
8.8.88 - with audio
Silly farts - with audio
The contingent apple - with audio
The profit of the beard - with audio
What masterpiece? - with audio
Spot the similarity - with audio
Cacography - with audio
Windy city - with audio
Corporeal integrity - with audio
Counting the cost - with audio
Dire diary - with audio
Three sciences - with audio
Antics - with audio
God in the body - with audio
The insolence of the inanimate - with audio
Hoardings - with audio
Stargazing - with audio
Truckling on - with audio
Nostalgia for Brezhnev - with audio
Dalliance - with audio
Booting up - with audio
Getting the idea - with audio

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09 November 2020

Egyptian Romance: a novel about travel

Once again, many people are under lockdown.  Once again, travel is hard, or impossible.  During the first lockdown, I published my black notebooks recording most of my travels over the last thirty-odd years.  So I thought this second lockdown might be a good moment to publish some more travel-related writing.

"Egyptian Romance" is a novel, but one based on information I gathered during my own trip to Egypt in 1990, which I published as a series of four posts earlier this year.  It represents a re-working of my black books from that trip in a form that some may find easier to read.  It can therefore be seen as part of a series, which includes A Partial India - a re-working of my travel notebook for India, and Walks with Lorenzetti, which re-visits a 1988 trip I made to Venice. 

Empire's End

or

The Tale of a Tourist


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03 August 2020

Introduction to Moody's Black Notebook Travels

I have two great regrets in my life.  One is eating a chicken sandwich in Varanasi, shortly before flying to Kathmandu.  This gave me the worst food poisoning I have ever experienced, nearly killed me, and meant that I missed a unique opportunity to visit Lhasa before it was turned into a Chinese Disneyland.  The other regret involves three Inter-rail trips that I made in 1979, 1980 and 1981.  They were extraordinarily rich in sights and experiences.  Stupidly, though, I did not keep a travel diary at that time, so all I have are vague, if important, memories of what I saw, thought and felt.

At least I was able to learn from these two huge blunders.  Afterwards, I no longer ate chicken sandwiches in exotic lands, and I kept travel diaries for all my major trips.  The latter took the form of black notebooks, bought from Ryman's, in two formats: one small enough to fit in a pocket, and another, slightly larger, that I kept in the travel bag I used for longer journeys. 

I now have dozens of these notebooks sitting behind me, filled with my illegible scrawl.  I have been meaning to turn them into digital texts for some years, and to bring them into the 21st century, but have never got around to it until now.  I am not transcribing them in any set order, but will place links to them below, as they go online, ordered chronologically.  There is no overall plan, no overall significance.  They are just what they are: quick thoughts jotted down in black notebooks, captured moments of a specific time and place.

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01 August 2020

Walks with Lorenzetti: Venice, Memory, Tourism

Just as A Partial India was a re-working of my travel notebook for India, so Walks with Lorenzetti re-visits a 1988 trip I made to Venice.  A Partial India and the notes it is based on try to capture the unrepeatable impact of seeing India for the first time.  Walks with Lorenzetti is quite different.  Although it was a particularly intense few days in Venice, it was far from my first trip there.  I brought with me other memories of the city and elsewhere, as well as various kinds of relevant knowledge built up over the years before.

Walks with Lorenzetti therefore goes beyond simply re-working one of my travel notebooks.  It weaves in other major strands, including three of the city's greatest creators and their art: the music of Vivaldi, the paintings of Canaletto, and the writing of Goldoni.  Above all, it follows in the footsteps of another book: Guido Lorenzetti's Venice and its Lagoon, a forgotten masterpiece that deserves to be better-known.  I hope the following pages will help to achieve that.

Foreword

Preamble

Introductory Chapters

The book
The itineraries
The man

The Twelve Itineraries

I - First act: eighth itinerary
II - First night movement: Allegro più ch’è possible
III - First portrait: Antonio Vivaldi
IV - Second act: ninth itinerary
V - Second night movement: intermezzo
VI - Second portrait: Carlo Goldoni
VII - Third act: third itinerary
VIII - Third night movement: capriccio
IX - Third portrait: Antonio Canaletto
X - Fourth act: fourth itinerary
XI - Fourth night movement: finale
XII - Fourth portrait: itinerant biographies

Recollections

The personal tempest

Venice and its Lagoon

Souvenir

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