Clearly a lot has happened since I last wrote here!

Since I moved to Brunswick, there’s been a homeless man who is pretty much a fixture of my street. You always see him sitting on a particular bench. He says hello, people stop and chat with him, sometimes (but not always) he asks for money.

You don’t know how happy it makes me that the days of the record store are coming to an end…

It’s been a long time since I’ve read any literary theory or criticism, but I’ve recently been enjoying Franco Moretti’s collection of essays Distant Reading, picked up in a Verso e-book sale.

I like, I don’t like: This is of no importance to anyone; this, apparently, has no meaning. And yet all this means: my body is not the same as yours. Hence, in this anarchic foam of tastes and distastes, a kind of listless blur, gradually appears the figure of a bodily enigma, requiring complicity or irritation. Here begins the intimidation of the body, which obliges others to endure me liberally, to remain silent or polite confronted by pleasures or rejections which they do not share.

Looking through DVDs in JB Hifi the other day, I was surprised to see Everybody Loves Raymond in the HBO section. Wtf, Everybody Loves Raymond was an HBO show? (I say this not out of disdain for Raymond, which I actually think is a well-made and generally underrated sitcom in the classic mould, but you know what I mean when I say it doesn’t feel like an HBO show.)

I can’t remember when I started going for walks – often long walks – most nights. But when I lived in North Melbourne, until just over a year ago, I had several routes hard-wired into my memory, so that on setting out, it was just a matter of choosing which one to take.