A long blogging absence. Its strange how this desire for self-expression, or at anyrate for self-recording, waxes and wanes. Partly because it's not focussed I guess: it doesnt have an obvious point, in the way that writers diaries usually do for instance—they record usable material, even a weirdly inexpressive one like Evelyn Waugh's. And then I leave for London next Monday and won't be doing much blogging there I guess. Probably the real diary writer writes to find, which must also mean to invent, themselves too. I'd like to do that, but maybe I'm too much here already. Or there's not enough of me for it work like that.
But then the original idea of this was to record consumption, as a kind of corrective or penace for consuming. And I have bought an ipod this week (useful when travelling??), spending much of the last couple of days transferring music onto it...and a bunch of books at Strands...the last time I was in NYC I avoided it, and it's really not a shop I like, there are so many books there, and so many books no-one really wants, that literature itself seems to lose some of its value, but this time, with an afternoon to kill in the Village found myself there and none the less bought about three hundred dollars worth of books almostnone of which are necessary to anything I want to think or do, at least right now. Yet I was delighted to find a volume of Bishop Warburton's letters to his publishers and other literary figures...who's Bishop Warburton???...the mid eighteenth-century divine who dominated the establishment intellectual life of his time, an overbearing, pompous man, who sucked up to Alexander Pope, edited his work argubly against its true spirit, and a polemicist for the confessional state. As I argue in an academic essay, he helped produce sentimentalism or at least Sternean sentimentalism in reaction to him....he's important because he represents a way that modernity did not proceed....the other books more for collecting: and one time in this space I'd like to try to figure out