Walking Commentary
Manchester to Rome 2022
New gatekeepers have emerged to fill the vacuum created by a media increasingly needing ‘likes’ for a codependent life-support system based on advertising revenue support. Such codependency is maladapted and objectivity is a price the media seem prepared to pay. The Bellingcat group is good place to look for accurate reporting. But how did we get to needing citizen journalists for our truths?
We heard the siren call of the seals this afternoon. Pod, rookery or harem, there were upwards of a dozen of the pinnipeds basking in the diffuse light on rocks exposed by a very low tide.
It was befitting of Bloom’s Day to see the seals in Sandycove where James Joyce spent six nights in 1904. ‘A sleek brown head, a seal’s, far out on the water, round’ was his description of Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. Could this have been inspired by the Sandycove ancestors of these seals?
I sat down to write about non-obviousness as a thought experiment. I’d cleared my desk of a litter of barely legible notes, making room for a Gedankenexperiment and a second cup of strong coffee. These notes were written in bed in the dark between 4 and 5 this morning. That’s a trick I learned from Lia though it’s taken me twenty years to put it into practice.
Then my phone almost saved me from myself. I was contacted, though not tasked, to see if there were any giraffes in my study. A safari of this kind required I reload an enormous back-catalogue of photos into Lightroom which left me with time and coffee-energy to write up a non-obvious journal entry.
What thoughts and whose ideas have a value?
Lia bought 20 Lines a Day by Harry Mathews recently. Stendhal had commented that “20 lines a day, genius or not, was a good place to start”. I was deeply impressed by Scarlet and Black when I first read it perhaps 40 years ago. A conversation with Gerry Hanley in the bar of the Delgany Inn elucidated from him that Stendhal got him writing with those same words. I had only just finished reading Scarlet and Black and was quite surprised at the coincidence, his bringing Stendhal up over a pint, my knowing who he was talking about. But I didn’t write 20 lines a day. Maybe that was a good thing?
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