Procrastination: thinking about the bush

Well I haven't written much, or done much, but I've been thinking about a few things.

I've been reading Zadie Smith's White Teeth, which is quite interesting if you like that sort of thing, the sort of question that it raises. And yes, I do.

It doesn't explicitly deal with 'home' questions, but the questions it asks are equivalent. If anything it's more specifically about identity, but identity AS an immigrant, in a certain place, with a certain past. More generally, it looks at questions of both the individual and place, both having history.

It's an interesting way of looking at things - very literary, very philosophical, yet also very subtle. The characters are searching for a 'neutral' place for two estranged brothers to meet. This could have been related in a range of ways, but it is described specifically in terms of 'neutrality' with regard to history - and when they meet, the room is rewritten in their conversation, becoming no-longer-neutral, as it gains connections with the past, with history.

What's interesting is that although its questions are nearly equivalent to questions of 'home', they are in a sense quite different. They cover the same territory without reverting to the idea of 'home' itself. None of the immigrants is ever not-at-home, nor at-home, merely in a place, with their specific history. You could say that 'home is where the history is', if you wanted to - but Smith doesn't want to. Why would you bother searching for home?

So, I ask myself the same question?
If I am going walking in the bush, I might be covering the same territory - unearthing, writing, creating history, and writing self and place - but need it be cached in the terminology of the 'home'?


Well that's my thinking.
Perhaps next time I'll look at 'home' itself, maybe. We'll see.

First Post

Well, here it is.
Is it here to stay?

First post in a blog, my blog. Hopefully not my affliction.

Had been thinking of blogging lately - or somethinging. Something to get me writing, to get words down on paper, somewhere to write whateverthehellIwant - but more importantly to compel me to actually do so.

First questions come first and will be addressed first, in part:
'An open-ended set of bushwalks' - look up '6 Walks in the Fictional Woods'.
Book starts well, becomes average. But the metafictional stance is interesting, and particularly the interesting meaning and metaphor of the title.
Open-ended because blogs aren't book length; they start, and they either get updated or not. Bushwalks because 'walking in the woods' is entirely inappropriate, obviously, and because my forests are not necessarily fictional. Though I wouldn't be surprised if often there are connections.

But then, as we know, there are always connections.

Til next time, I shall be thinking of something interesting to say.