Earning a Living by the Pen

I have returned. Loved Edinburgh and would like to live there one day. Had a good trip to Durham and it was great to catch up with friends. The whole trip was pretty tough in some respects, plenty of psychoanalytic material from the depths of my psyche. As Freud once remarked, there is no such thing as an accident. Anyway, I'm back in Cambridge and spent the evening with some friends in a pub drinking some kind of stout identified by a man in a uniform on the label. No, really.

I've had a popular essay accepted, too. It turns out I'll even have a contract from Wiley-Blackwell. I suppose I can now be said, like the characters of Gissing's New Grub Street, to be earning a living by the pen - in the valley of the shadow of books. Though I hope I shall not go the way of Edwin Reardon: depression, marital breakdown, illness and death.

I hope you like my new photo: an actual image of me replaces a homage to Wittgenstein on the ineffability of coffee. The photo was taken on the platform at Edinburgh Waverly railway station by a talented friend whose blog is well worth a read.

Trip

The thesis has, I hope temporarily, ground to a halt.

Off to Edinburgh on Tuesday followed by Durham. I shall be on the look-out for gentlemans' outfitters. I've decided too to have my 'Nietzsche phase' whilst away. I plan to start with an article by my former supervisor followed by The Birth of Tragedy, followed by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I shall stop short of the advice of this man to read them in the bath.

Lethargy

Hut

I have been reading about Heidegger's hut in a book called Heidegger's Hut. Interesting to read about the supposed relationship between H's mountain shack and his philosophy. Is inspiring me in some inarticulable way. The conference paper on Tillich is going nowhere fast but I don't care. And I've had an article on existentialist aesthetics accepted. Woot!

I plan to have my long-overdue 'Nietzsche phase' in Durham over Easter. In the words of Ian Curtis, [Where] "will it end?"