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Its been several years since I posted here. Over the intervening years my literary tastes and drives have changed. I no longer read crime fiction of any kind. I recent years my reading is almost exclusively fact-based covering the subjects of travelogue, sociology, history and more recently, the more esoteric subject of psychogeography which is a topic that deserves an article in its own right.

One of my favourite exponents of psychogeography is the English writer/film-maker John Rogers who lives and works in London, England. You can find his Youtube channel by following this link.

It was while watching one of John Roger’s videos that he mentioned an American poet Richard Hugo (1923-1982) for his love of the Pacific North West and the state of Washington. Hugo spun poetic gold from the many threads of the Pacigic North West’s geography, sense of place in terms of time, history, space and people. Rogers cited Hugo as a psychogeographer even though its unlikely Hugo ever used the term.

To say I also got into poetry would be an exageration but I have definitely gotten into the works of Richard Hugo. He is not a conventional poet, in fact he reminds me of Walt Whitman in terms of transcendalism and ultra-realism and finding beauty and fascination with details other poets may overlook or disregard as inconsequential.

What does this mean if you’re in too much of a hurry to investigate?

Well, let me put it like this…if poets were beekeepers, Richard Hugo would ponder why certain bees buzzed in a certain way, why one settled on that particular branch the way it did, what forces compelled this bee do this, another bee that. Left-field in other words.

This Blog

This blog will no longer be known as the Noirista’s Lounge even though I still very much love the noir genre in literature and film but I don’t want to be restricted in subject matter.

The archive content will remain in place but I will post fresh articles once a week from now on. I was going to use the word ‘content’ as that’s what how the doyens of social media put it e.g. “I upload new content regularly”

Content vs Articles

There is something cold, utilitarian about the word ‘content’. It makes me wince in the same way I wince when I see restaurant/cafe menus refer to ‘protein’ e.g. ‘Now you’ve chosen your vegetables, you can now choose your protein”

If you have made music, just call it music. If you have written an article, call it an article. If you’ve recorded a video, call it a video. Perhaps the word ‘content’ has a case in its defence for being a collective word for several kinds of media formats/types but still, this blog deals in the written word and the written word alone and for these reasons, I will steer clear of referring to my work as ‘content’.

I do wish cafes would stop using the word ‘protein’ and resume using words such as a fish, chicken, pork and beef. Protein is a word more befitting for food scientists and dieticians, not social settings.

I’ll leave us with some quotes from Richard Hugo:

“Never write a poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it.”

“You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything“