Well sometimes it feels like a toss-up between the two, when maybe you really want both. Is it a nostalgia for memories I don't have? What is the future of nostalgia? City vs country, a glug of socio-economic terms unredefined by Kirsty Allsopp? Maybe and yes I should read Raymond Williams' 'The Country and the City', but what about Kerouac's 'The Town and the City'? Or the small city and the big city? This city and any other city? This country near that city near that country where that city is. Jobs and cars in the country, walking, recycling and greeting in the city. Poetries of place, poetries of unplacing or unpoetings of replacing? Exile, wanderlust, space, place, comfort, intimacy, Leonard Cohen, nomadic concepts, self-sufficiency, tranquilizers, Tolstoy, bedtime reading, nakedness, yes, ponchos, sleep, John Fashanu, sleep. Then back to Thoreau and the nouveau-roman.
So, always perhaps like Mercier and Camier, backing and forthing, really between neither, "as between two lit refuges whose doors once neared gently close, once away turned from gently part again". Or Sesame Street. How the hell did old JH, and I don't mean Prynne, do it? Always right on the fucking money. Now that's the book I should read, piggy, while tater tot eaters accrue wet sebum in Hemel Hampstead.
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