In Faversham

Sold a few paperbacks in Faversham at Past Sentence. Purchased some pipe tobacco as well. Ate some beef jerky from one of the market stalls. Now, in the library.

Turned out be a sunny but extremely windy day. Not perfect weather at all for sunbathing.

Regardless of the weather i have some visits to do , which i might do today or some time next week, and hence, vacillating between which options to take.

Then i though about my ornery erstwhile cousin whose boneheaded decisions have lead to this chasmal quake. Ah, fiddlesticks, Ashford beckons for a visit at a men's fashion shop in the Designer Outlet Centre.

Just Wondering

What was the best advice you took from a friend?

What was the best advice you gave a friend?

Do you ever act on advice given or come up with your own?

Cool Dude

The cool dude that is my bro - from four years ago.

Saturday Music Selection - Folk Flavours

A mixed bag of grooves for today -

Sandy Denny - Here in Silence

( More flavours here )

In The Bourne

I was watching some Charmed on DVD and then i thought - heck i need a beer - so here i am - just arrived in the local Spoons pub. It has been a windy , albeit a very windy day, but has become somewhat quiescent this evening. We had some precipitation but not too much and we still have a full moon. It looked lovely last night but clided over this evening. Lycanthrope tendencies apart, i am not howling at the moon.

For dinner i bought some smoked peppered mackerel going cheap and a salad with it. It was a bargain in the supermarket at only 66p instead of £2.05 0 and it was delicious.

So True

Book 69 - Joan Didion "The White Album"

Joan Didion - The White Album: Essays (FSG Classics)




As much as I loathe her frail-artiste pretensions Didion can be absolutely stunning.

At her best and shorn of her overworn neurasthenic security blanket, she has a gimlet eye capable of dissecting the messy, pulsating core of, well, America. Didion describes with a sort of preternatural, almost omniscient clarity, prying into the still-beating heart of the 60s, 70s, 80,s WHENEVER. She can be that oracle - a master of stripping a society down to its ticking cogs. And yet, she also refuses to Explain It All; she's a translator, not a storyteller, which can be frustrating. It would be fantastic to harness that ultra-charged, feverish mind to make some clarity, some sense out of, you know, all of this mess! Right here! But this same reluctance to explain is also the source of her essays' powers and strengths. Because Didion's so unwilling to hammer her observations into the straitjacket of some prescribed, prefab narrative, she's allowed to keep that widened aperture, recording everything that flashes across her always-dilated pupils without pruning out the complicated bits - the interesting bits.

She's not always absolutely coherent - the people she meets, the places she explores don't allow for that - but her eloquence and articulation and fanatic persistence in including everything are admirable and breathtaking in their own right. She's got a one-in-a-million set of eyes and thankfully a pen and voice to match. In a strange way, her clarity and her restraint remind me of Orwell a bit, with more frill, more baby-fat (not hard) and minus his sort of heart-hearted political twist.

Best read peacemeal and as a collection of essays you can dip anywhere into them whilst reading something else, and is exactly what i did.