The Chestnut-Seller

Here's a story by one of my favourite writers. It's called 'The Chestnut-Seller' and it's by Joris-Karl Huysmans.

Stands Scotland where it did?

So Paris went well. Delivered my paper, answered questions, went to my supervisor's paper, went to look at art. Saw some marvellous Cézannes and Redons in the Musée d'Orsay and something in the region of 100 Kandinsky paintings in the Pompidou Centre. I saw a two-volume Cézanne catalogue raisonné in a Cambridge bookshop today for £80 and am presently trying to justify buying it. It is, unbelievably, a bargain.

Went to Edinburgh, where I stayed with a friend, and thence across to a rather grim part of Glasgow for a workshop on museums. Although I got to see the store 'pods' for all the Glasgow museums, the talks were very pedestrian, despite their titles. But, back in Edinburgh, my friend introduced me to some interesting philosophers and I got to see the library of T. L. S. Sprigge. A real treat! It turns out that he had a shelf-ful of books by Santayana, on whom I may have to read Sprigge himself together with his magnum opus, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism. A far cry from his short Theories of Existence which I remember reading as an undergraduate.

I now ought to be writing my popular essay on Christmas but can't be arsed. That's why I'm writing this instead and listening to Life is Killing Me by Type O Negative to cheer myself up... And I've just bought some monsoon malabar online.

(Navet by Redon.)

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.

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?"