This Space of Writing ten years on

Today in 2015 my blog-collection This Space of Writing was published as a book. An ideal Christmas gift. Not a happy memory to be honest; an editor would have made it a better book. However, I can't fault the cover design, and I was lucky to have Flowerville's permission to use her photograph. 

Turning a blog into a book always seemed like a bad idea, implying unity where there is only the haphazard, but I take some reassurance in "Paths, not works", Heidegger's motto for his Gesamtausgabe, and Blanchot's practice of publishing essay collections focusing on specific authors and books rather than a general theme in a monumental magnum opus. In the photograph on the right, the book features on the impressive bookshelves of Andrew Hurley, an Irishman living in Paris, a friend made through the blog. He died young last year. The last I heard from him was in an email from Thomas Bernhard's favourite café in Vienna. 

One learns, as reflected in my second collection The Opposite Direction available as a free ebook. Reading again, I am happy to recommend the essays on (in order of appearance) Lanzmann's Shoah, Thomas Bernhard's Goethe Dies, Gabriel Josipovici's In a Hotel Garden, Peter Handke's To Duration, Coetzee's Jesus novels, Willem Styfhals' book on Gnosticism and German philosophy, Dante's Vita Nuova, and the title essay, also on Thomas Bernhard. I can fault the design this time, as it's by me, with a random photograph I took on the beach in Kemptown.