As if nothing has happened

You'd never know that once a dirt heap stood on this land. I miss it

I'm alright. Life goes on, sometimes it's good and sometimes it's shitty; also, sometimes what happens is personal, sometimes it's not. So there's a matrix.  LCD Soundsystem cancelling their Melbourne show for this Thursday, now, that clearly belongs to the shitty but not personal quadrant. Seeing Robert Doyle and Barnaby Joyce go down (sorry), well, that's wonderful of course, but not of personal benefit to me. 

The shitty and personal quadrant in my life teems with frenzied activity at the moment, but thanks to an established mental practice of adopting a perspective that recognises this sector is not all-enveloping, I can cope with things being bad there, I can even enjoy experiences that aren't related to my problems. In psychological terms I can cope. I am not succeeding at dealing with it in a practical sense, if that means changing the situation. But I'm doing okay at continuing, every day, as if nothing has happened.

Something I've been meaning to do is acknowledge the small handful of books I read last year that cut through in an important way. I read many other really excellent books in 2017 but it's these books I'm about to list ,and shortly to post some reflections about, that I'd have difficulty conveying the value of if for some hideous reason I had to write about them in the style of a public arbiter of books. (Really, I am constantly surprised that most of what passes for professional book journalism doesn't bore to death the people who write it, and furthermore that they apparently get paid to write it. It would be infinitely better for everybody involved if they got paid not to write it. Bring on the universal basic income.)  

Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit

Where'd you go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

Don Juan's Reckless Daughter by David Yaffe

Broken River by J. Robert Lennon

On a separate matter. Comrade Bazarov, I sent an email to your hotmail address. I don't have any other way of contacting you. Let me know if you didn't receive it. L