This beautiful icon arrived last week. Although, is 'beautiful' really the correct word? Icons are prayers or instances of the divine, a material link in an order that these days feels faint and distant. Does beauty still have a place in this disenchanted world, isn't it now a rub on a wound...

This beautiful icon arrived last week. Although, is 'beautiful' really the correct word? Icons are prayers or instances of the divine, a material link in an order that these days feels faint and distant. Does beauty still have a place in this disenchanted world, isn't it now a rub on a wound...

Watched Aki Kaurismäki's 'I Hired a Contract Killer' last night. Wonderful as all his films are. I love how he makes London look like one big desolate factory/demolition site (or maybe it looked like that in 1990...?) www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN80...

I enjoyed this immensely. It has been on my shelf for a long time (years?) and is unexpectedly wonderful. I thought it would be different from his other work, but didn’t realise it was such a meditation on a diverse range of art and artists, and on the intangible sense of the nebulous within them.

People should take advantage of this generous offer from Toby. Glantz is a disconcerting book, right down to the level of sentence structure, that thrusts you right into the contingency of the world, where the only certainty feels like a monolithic yet somehow inchoate sense of oppression.

A beautiful publication, gratefully received in the mail today. Many thanks Alexander @wordkunst.bsky.social I will return with more thoughts once I have made the time to read with the consideration it requires.

The sun is definitely getting higher in the sky...

The snow is on its way out now, but I'm still lost in its textures...

A chance to once again share the most unpardonable printing error I have ever found. In the faber & faber reissue of Thomas Bernhard's Extinction, page 10.

After reading the Krasznahorkai story 'A Murderer is Born', I've discovered/realised that I can bid on auctions for icons. This is maybe dangerous...

I found these old pictures from the first year I moved to Sweden and spent much more time out in the landscape. At some point I lost the feeling of wonder that I had. This winter has been the coldest I've experienced, but I've neglected to really experience it.

Over the ice to visit this little island.

The most perfect lyric in the German language: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkcU...

Stone wall, snow, trees, sun.

I enjoyed the two shows at Moderna Museet Malmö: Redoubt by John Skoog, a reconstruction of a monolithic bunker built by agricultural worker Karl-Göran Persson (1894 –1975), & Fractured Horizons by Edi Hila, paintings of what I think of as a sort of corroded realism from Albania.

New book acquisitions: Ice by Jacek Dukaj & The Children of the Dead by Elfriede Jelinek. The former came with appropriate weather; woke up to a cool minus twenty and Jack Frost on the windows.

The lilacs in the back garden are looking particularly grim and frostbitten this evening...

Can the idea of 'cathedral thinking' really mean all that much when it is isolated from the ordo of the medieval world? It predates Luther's separation of the temporal and sacred realms, and the development of the cogito, the modern subjectivity of the self.

I have a memory of reading about an author who wrote a novel in, I think, a prisoner of war camp, which was burnt by the guards and had to later be reconstructed through hypnosis. But I can't remember the author... does anyone have any idea who it might have been?

This used to be a lovely spot of stillness amid the trees. We usually pick bucket loads of blueberries here in the summer... I doubt there will be any this year. Just a reminder that I don't really live in the forest, but rather a giant industrial farm for the production of cardboard boxes...

I enjoyed this. Mainly for the the descriptions of London areas where I used to live -- Deptford, Greenwich, Blackheath --albeit in a different era. Despite the rather grim subject matter -- death, the devil, occultism, murder -- it felt like a light read.

Last night in a dream, I was debating a quote with someone. I was sure that it was from 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', and they said something else that I didn't recognise and can't remember. Now awake, I can't remember the last time I read Prufrock either, and certainly can't quote it...

Wow... This was both devastating and tender in its stripped back simplicity, the simple possibility of a life. It is also perhaps one of the best contemplations of the place of meaning and meaningless in the world, the relation of human and non-human, and the reality is the event that I have read.

In 1989, at school camp, we attempted to have a séance where, at my friend Maki's suggestion, we tried call up a professional wrestler named King Kong Bundy, who Maki said died by choking on an ice cream scoop. I'm only getting round to fact checking this now...

It is my birthday today and even though I have now lived in the northern hemisphere for 18 years, it still does not feel like my birthday when it is winter... even if I do love the winner...

When I woke up early this morning, I attempted to trick myself back to sleep by visualising the layouts of the houses of my childhood friends. It seems so sad, all those moments, all those things, they are gone, they led to nothing.

The strange patterns of pines outlined by fresh snow when seen from below.

Snowy textures...

An afternoon walk through the village...

An afternoon walk through the village...

There is more sun in this video then we saw in all of the first 2/3rds of December. More snow too...

Minus fifteen last night... Jack Frost, or Kung Bore as he is known here in Sweden, left these feathers of ice on our windows.

It really is just incredible filmmaking. RIP Béla Tarr. youtu.be/_d5X2t_s9g8?...

After a bit of work we will finally be able to escape the house...

I might skip my run this afternoon...

On page 365 of Schattenfroh, I came across the following: 'the question as to which of the three chairs is more real and true occupies me'. It made me think of the artwork 'One and three chairs' (1965) by Joseph Kosuth, and how it shows the question of ekphrasis that is central to the book.

Glacial erratics: Stones carried by the ice and left behind when it melted about 12,000 years ago. Once thought to have been thrown by trolls or the devil, now they rest like altars amongst the Gothic columns of the forest.

The clear pastel pinks and blues that mean it is a cold night coming...

This year I also printed up and drew a line under the manuscript that I have been working on and sending to agents/publishers for some time. There are a few hours of it still available, if you would like one please DM me. And many thanks to all those who have taken the time and interest to read.

Another highlight was launching this fantastic series of Manuals on artistic materials, forms, creation, and pedagogy for the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm back in January. I wrote introductions and co-edited them with the wonderful Johanna Gustafsson Fürst and Assist Mendizadal.

Some highlights from my reading of 2025 (leaving out all the reading I did for work). This year was mostly about Proust, even if my project of writing notes here ran up against the character limit. Schattenfroh is still in progress. A lot of Strindberg research is also absent here...

Sourdough vörtbröd, a traditional Swedish Christmas bread made with dark ale, spices, syrup and sultanas.

I really really want to see this film, it looks and sounds amazing, but I have no idea where or how it is available... www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysKT...

About twenty years ago, somewhere in Australia, I bought a second-hand copy of Radon Daughters by Iain Sinclair only to find that Rowland S Howard had written his name inside...

I have been noticing recently that a lot of books from big reputable publishers are full of widows and orphans and other such typographical issues, hyphenating over page breaks, etc. is this an issue that people simply no longer care about?

More books arrive... I'm not sure what will be the next read...

Finally joining in on this one... Although I noted that if I read it in Swedish I could already be up to volume VI.

I took this photograph of chalk cliffs many years ago. But I thought of it again recently after reading a lot about the paintings of August Strindberg. I am also reading his 1890 novel 'By the Open Sea', with particular attention to his construction of nature.

Some recent book acquisitions... Weighing up when to drive into Schattenfroh. I have a feeling that the print on demand binding won't survive the reading... But what book does survive being read?

This weather and these landscapes are back. Ironically, I find myself writing about summer landscapes instead... I have not photographed anything in a long time, I somehow lost that drive.