Matt Colquhoun's Blog, page 24

Tropics

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer: My whole being was responding to the dictates of an ambience which it had never before experienced; that which I could call myself seemed to be contracting, condensing, shrinking from the stale, customary boundaries of the flesh whose perimeter know only the modulations of the nerve ends. And the more […]

Actualising Literature

The schizo knows how to leave: he has made departure into something as simple as being born or dying. But at the same time his journey is strangely stationary, in place. He does not speak of another world, he is not from another world: even when he is displacing himself in space, his is a […]

Absurdity

“The absurd man, turned toward nothingness as toward the most obvious absurdity, feels himself foreign enough to his own life to accept it, travel through it, and even enhance it.” Life, at present, feels newly rich in its meaninglessness, if also equally trivial. But how to encounter with compassion a meaning projected from without? It […]

Taking Risks

“Risk is necessary to understand what matters in depth, another risk — chance — to give oneself over to what one has understood.” What is the payoff of risk other than survival? Or the new understanding that one can weather more than first thought? Nietzche’s genericsed aphorism, “Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker“, “What […]

Desiderio Postcapitalista. Le Ultime Lezioni.

Thanks to Serena Mazzini for bringing this to my attention on Instagram. Postcapitalist Desire, the book of Mark Fisher’s final lectures I edited and introduced in the first lockdown, has been translated into Italian by Vincenzo Perna and published by Minimum Fax. You can buy it here.

Knight of Journals

On Kierkegaard’s Journals, Blanchot writes: “One has the illusion of finding in them the ideal itinerary that would allow one to observe a thought before coming to it.” I feel like I am entering a new stage of grief, although what or why I am actually grieving, I’m not quite sure. Trauma selves rupture any […]

Reading

Out of the red and silver and the long cry of alarm to the poet who survives in all human beings, as the child survives in him; to the poet she threw an unexpected ladder in the middle of the city and ordained, ‘Climb!’ As she appeared, the orderly alignment of the city gave way […]

“A Subject Cut Into Pieces”: Interview in The Courier

I think, for me, the question was less about speaking through others at first, and more getting out of myself through someone else. But Deleuze remains a potent reference in that regard. I like the reasoning he gives for writing his book on Michel Foucault, long after having established his own name. “When someone that you like and […]

25/06/2022

Jesmond; Quayside; country night at Zerox; Kitty and Jon b2b at World HQ; Jesmond Dene; home.

Seeing and Seen

I struggled to write today. Yesterday’s scrawl was finished on my laptop. There is something quite opaque about writing in this way at the moment. The decision to stop, save, close feels oddly final. Whereas the journal is paused, its flow not so much stopping as being turned away from, the mechanical nature of the […]