Me Today in Popula

It's unfair of me to announce the (month-old) arrival of Popula just when it's about to go behind a partial paywall, but there it is. They some excellent writing and if you can subscribe, you should.

I have two pieces on there, in a category they call Me Today. Just people around the world writing about the things that happen to them on any given day, the mundane, the fantastic, the sheer everyday-ness of living one's life.

The first one is about bees and the most recent one is about that eclipse in January.

I enjoyed writing these more than I have nearly anything else in the last year or so. I am grateful when the words come. 

Search engines, writing advice and miscellaneous trivia

What did you expect? It's Saturday, idyllically sandwiched between Friday's anxious socialising and Sunday's frantic preps for the week to follow.

Of course there's work but everyone knows what to do with it on Saturdays.

(If you don't, I'm fairly certain link #1 will have the answers).

And even though you should be prepared for time-wasting persiflage, with no further ado, I give you...

1. The Calvin & Hobbes Search Engine, which I found on Slate, while reading...

2. Kurt Vonnegut give his students the kind of assignment I wish my teachers had given me.

3. Oh, and of course you wanted to know that Yoko Ono's Lennon-inspired menswear collection has a bumless (I don't even need to say any more, do I?).

4. While we're on the subject of The Beatles, a story about George in Rishikesh.

5. And just to creep you out, this image.

'Ideas are what you want to get rid of'

Leonard Cohen, when asked if he learns something from writing songs, if he works out ideas that way:

"I think you work out something. I wouldn't call them ideas. I think ideas are what you want to get rid of. I don't really like songs with ideas. They tend to become slogans. They tend to be on the right side of things: ecology or vegetarianism or antiwar. All these are wonderful ideas but I like to work on a song until those slogans, as wonderful as they are and as wholesome as the ideas they promote are, dissolve into deeper convictions of the heart. I never set out to write a didactic song. It's just my experience. All I've got to put in a song is my own experience."

Also this.

Where I am

Yes, ok. This is an unconscionably long time away from the blog and for the few of you who still check in to see if there's something new, I'm very sorry about the long silence.

The reason? I've been in Scotland, at the University of Stirling, since the beginning of this week and will be here for three months on a Charles Wallace Fellowship.

Writing plans aside, let me tell you why this compelled my silence: everyone knows by now that I'm a bit of a joke when it comes to travel. So there was plenty to do and agonise over in the last month before I left. But the real reason is, I guess I'm just superstitious about not talking about things too soon.

That only partly explains the changed nature of the writing on this blog. The other is, I've just become rusty at it. One indication to myself about just how rusty I've become: I've reconsidered nearly every word I've typed since I began this post ten minutes ago; nearly discarded it, returned and slogged on.

So yes, I will strive for some regularity, seeing as I'm not on Facebook, not (yet) on Twitter and have no intention of completely losing touch with any of you. But the other writing - the reason I'm here - is primary. If I talk inanities instead of sense, consider the blog my warm-up page and kindly excuse.

At least I'm back, yeah?