#wishiwashere — Public Fediverse posts

Finally read @mjohnharrison's newish book. A summary:
* this probably isn't a biography.
* climbing: now there's a thing.
* not sure whether it's a good idea to outlive the cat.
* where did I put my notebook(s)?

Highly recommended to fans of all of the above.

Okay, back to K-pop and old computers.
#WishIWasHere #MJohnHarrison #antimemoir

2/2

… the weight of evidence such that each of us is really no more than palimpsest, dense overlays of misrememberings and dismemberings. Perhaps it’s a book about writing, about not writing, about an escape to and from writing: I don’t really know, and don’t need to know; I just absolutely loved its brilliance.

So looking forward to seeing the author at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this coming August.

#MJohnHarrison #WishIWasHere #AntiMemoir #Bookstodon

1/2

‘Wish I Was Here’: this delightful, insightful, stubbornly peculiar anti-memoir by Mike Harrison is my book of the year so far; can’t see anything overtaking it, frankly.

The writing is as luminously sui generis and haunting as his best work, although there’s so much in that category to render the superlative clumsy. It’s also fictively tricksy, memory standing in for the undeniable, unreliable narrator, … (continued)

#MJohnHarrison #WishIWasHere #AntiMemoir #Bookstodon @mjohnharrison

"[L]et’s think a bit more about this complex business of relating what we think of as a self to what we think of as a past."

Lovely short interview with @mjohnharrison here:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/20/m-john-harrison-i-want-to-be-the-first-human-to-imitate-chatgpt-wish-i-was-here

Mentions being a chocolate addict. I know the feeling, and can recommend a supplier - Zotter.
https://www.zotter.at/en/online-shop/brands/labooko
Their Labooko range is my drug of choice nowadays.

#WishIWasHere #MJohnHarrison #ChocolateAddict #Bookstodon #Memory #AntiMemoir #philosophy #PhilosophyOfMemory

"People take what scraps of personal memory they want to believe in and erect a house of experiential straw"

From 'The Centauri Device' by @mjohnharrison

Reading this book has really got me looking forward to what M John Harrison describes as his 'anti-memoir', Wish I Was Here.

Will he, should we, like Pater, burn our houses to the ground?

Can we prevent our past shaping our present, and would we want to?

#CentauriDevice #MJohnHarrison #AntiMemoir #WishIWasHere #Philosophy #Memory