c.c. o'hanlon

I gave a talk recently about re-enchant as resistance. I didn't put enough mention of the cultural dislocation so many of us feel at the moment or enough mention the things that help resolve that. We are living through a period of engineered disorientation and it damn well needs opposing.

Lew Welch, from “Circle Poems”

Once again I am suggesting that you break some rules for practice. Get comfortable with breaking rules. When the rules are hurting other people, the right thing to do is break them. We need people who follow their moral code over the rules of their society, university, employer, and government.

Obsession: Ever searching for that which can't be found. Keniji Haino insheepsclothinghifi.com/keiji-haino-... youtu.be/AYOhR0Xt3uo?...

Joseph Beuys, Overcome Party Dictatorship Now, 1971 https://botfrens.com/collections/14375/contents/1078819

How did I miss this?

Gary Snyder / from “Japan First Time Around” in <Earth House Hold>

Fifty years after punk “explodes”; high time, therefore to write about the man who started it all, Edward Burra, for @thequietus.com thequietus.com/opinion-and-...

Predappio - the town where Mussolini was born & where his remains lie - is a grotesque neo_Fascist fever dream. I visited during his birthday commemorations & wrote on what its willingness to exploit his memory says about the country, and the rise of its far-right. In the latest @lrb.co.uk

"There is a curious fashion in British politics. People who have spent years telling the rest of us to toughen up seem remarkably keen to take offence themselves." The Cult of the Thick Skin, Peter Bach's (@lyst.bsky.social) latest for @counterpunchmedia.bsky.social.

Heavy rain, thunder overhead, and lightning. There's already shallow flooding. Tires hiss like cartoon snakes as cars thread the narrow street below our bedroom window.

"After John Cage has done four and a half minutes of silence, the task of the avant-garde is not to then do five minutes of silence. That’s kitsch." Going to be thinking about @return2sanders.bsky.social's interview with Tom McCarthy whenever anyone talks about experimental literature:

A reminder from @cultauthor.bsky.social: "Every musician, artist, writer and designer should be paid for their work and not have it stolen. If you don’t understand this, you have a moral deficiency and are clearly an absolute fuckwit. It really is this simple."

From last year: "I was still the old modernist, making moves I didn’t know I still had in me. I owned the music, kept the faith and was not too old to dream." @ajlees.bsky.social reclaims his Northern Soul in Blackpool. burninghousepress.com/2025/11/26/t...

So many of my friends are doing things this year that it's hard to keep up but poet Kyla Houbolt @luaz.bsky.social has just published a new volume of her work, Little Survivors Everywhere. You can order it directly here: pearlpirie.com/product/litt... If you want a signed copy, let Kyla know.

My son, yesterday, outside the apartment building in Tokyo where I lived — and where he stayed with me for an extended period — back in the early 00s, when he was 8 years old. Tokyo was safe enough for a smart, savvy kid, raised on Dragonball Z and Gundam, to explore on his own. He loved it.

An early evening appointmet with my cardiologist: an ECG, an ultrasound, a revision of my several medications, and a referral to an endocrinologist. Also, unsettling news about my heart's functionality. The next few days — and a few hundred Euros — will be lost to further tests and consultations.

Awake at 4am. So dark! Tilly dog still sleeping and the house silent. The morning breeze lifts the blind. Only one bird singing close by the window. No sounds in the street. A long, slow, stretch before easing out of bed and soft-padding towards the kitchen and coffee.

Ugh. "'It looks dangerously like the construction of an internal spying agency,' said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union... "It’s also a weapon that the government will likely use against not only undocumented immigrants, but everyone else, too."

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

Another unrealised aspiration...[sigh]

Saturday afternoon reading: Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe, who provokes urgent re-consideration of the enduring, European-centric perspective of pre-colonial Australia — and the people who inhabited it — and argues another, very different reality.

Love this doc on the low-lying North Frisian islands out off the German coast in the North Sea, and how they deal with the threat of rising sea levels (especially the tiny train that goes out to Nordstrandischmoor, a place of a few houses, some sheep & a lot of oomska) youtu.be/CmHsAtX-Kt8?...

Anne Carson’s 2025 LRB Winter Lecture, ‘Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind’, announced her Parkinson’s diagnosis and the effect it was having on her hands and handwriting. Read: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4... Watch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8fP...

Amongst Peter Hujar’s contact sheets (still up at the Morgan Library), a few portraits, unidentified and undated, but undoubtedly of jazz multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

Fucking Musk, devoid of admirable qualities, just another simpering Putin fan-boy, like Trump, betraying everyone and aiding and abetting Russia's destruction of Ukraine.

@ccohanlon.bsky.social “It is the illusion of our time that the non-conformist is in the ascendant…. In fact, the odd man out has never been so much at risk or so completely menaced by that conspiracy of power we are pleased to call government.” - Morris West, Preface to THE HERETIC (1969)

3.15am and I'm trying to get through paperwork for a visa application that is probably doomed. I need coffee.

Immigrants & asylum seekers are not our enemies. They are not responsible for the austerity, privatisation, erosion of civic life, thinning of democracy and concentration of power we suffer. But they're being punished for these things. Punished at the behest of the very people who *are* responsible.

Lovely article on Dial House, an absolutely beautiful place. When I went to interview Penny Rimbaud there for Out Of The Woods he told me amazing tall story, claiming to have knocked out the UK’s comms with the nuclear submarine fleet by flying a kite into the nearby Marconi military radio masts

I read a lot of Jeffrey Archer's novels when I was a kid & found them quite exciting. Mind you, I loved that sort of thing – Hornblower, the first six Tom Clancy novels, Douglas Reeman etc etc. Were they a guilty pleasure? No, I was 12/13. But I like how Sinclair writes about it all here:

My father died on this day, 27 years ago. My wife found his lifeless body by his desk, moments after his heart gave out. A writer, he had been at work right up until the last seconds of his life: his pen had trailed from an incomplete word, down the page of the yellow legal pad he used for drafts.

"Women, minorities and migrants are still discriminated against and abused. The right to development is still not accepted by everybody. Power still corrupts, and leaders are still prepared to sacrifice their people in order to retain it." – Navanethem 'Navi' Pillay [via @jeremymberg.bsky.social]

They steal the saint while you’re making the shrine -W. S. Merwin, from ‘Korean Figures’ (for m.o.)

Didn’t we all? [sigh]

YES! Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature.

After a night of rolling thunder and heavy rain, a leaden dawn and flashes of distant lightning.

‘In this world of onrushing events the act of meditation - even just a one-breath meditation - straightening the back, clearing the mind for a moment - is a refreshing island in the stream’ Gary Snyder #garysnyder #onebreathmeditation