I can’t seem to get the hang of this blogging malarkey. I wish I were more like the poet George Szirtes, who seems able to blog eloquently and at length on just about anything, and no matter where he is. Stuck in an airport? Out on the road? George will find a terminal. Age, and generational models of early adoption, don’t seem to be a factor, either, because George is a little older than me and has taken to blogging like a duck to water, while I don’t really get it, and can’t quite commit.

 

I’ve noticed one blog fallback is the listing of things, books read, records listened to, etc. I’m not going to resort to that. Oh, go on then. It’s a quiet Sunday night in Lancaster, and there’s nothing doing. Here are the books stacked on my bedside table, as of tonight:

Nabokov: Novels and Memoirs 1941 – 1951
Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works
The Tree Name Trail: a key to common trees
Vladimir Nabokov: the American Years  Brian Boyd
A Moment’s Monument  Jennifer Ann Wagner
Britain’s Structure and Scenery  L. Dudley Stamp
The Hawk in the Rain  Ted Hughes
The Half Healed  Michael Symmons Roberts
Why Brownlee Left  Paul Muldoon
Collected Poems  Louis MacNeice

Makes me seem, I don’t know, a bit literary or something? I can assure you, I’m not. There is also a torch, a pinecone, a blister pack of nicotine gum (2mg) and a box of tissues. Why am I telling you this? I’ve strayed from National Poetry Day, and ‘work’, though I guess reading is a kind of work: pleasurable work. I’m going to bed now; I’ve a busy week ahead of me.