Marginalia

8 September 2026 · 6 min

On rereading The Book of Disquiet in a noisy kitchen

I keep a second copy in the kitchen drawer, next to the tea towels, because the only reliable reading hour left in the week is the twenty minutes while the kettle cools. Pessoa survives this treatment better than almost anything else I own. The fragments are already interrupted; one more interruption costs nothing.

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”

What strikes me on the fourth pass is how much of the book is weather reporting. Rain on Rua dos Douradores, the particular grey of an office afternoon, light that arrives without warming anything. Strip the metaphysics out and you are left with a very long, very careful diary of a man watching a street he refuses to walk down.

I underlined three passages this time and none of them were the famous ones.

portugal rereading

22 August 2026 · 4 min

Three books about repairing things

A small accidental trilogy assembled itself on the bedside table this month, all of it about mending rather than making.

1. The Craftsman, Richard Sennett — still the best argument I know that thinking happens in the hands and not upstream of them.
2. Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford — overstates the case by roughly thirty percent, which is exactly the right amount for a polemic.
3. Kintsugi, an exhibition catalogue I bought in Kanazawa and cannot read a word of. The photographs do the whole job.

The thread running through all three: a repaired object carries more information than a new one. The break is the record.

craft lists

30 July 2026 · 9 min

Notes toward an essay on street names

Started a file called streets.md in April; it is now four thousand words of nothing in particular. The argument, such as it is: a city's street names are the only history that every resident is obliged to memorise, and the only history that gets quietly overwritten without anybody voting on it.

Sources so far are thin. Two municipal gazetteers, one very good chapter in a book about Naples, and a postcard collection I have been scanning at 600dpi on Sunday mornings. If you know of anything written about renaming as a municipal practice rather than a political one, the address is at the bottom.

cities drafts