My Journal’s 5-Year Anniversary

The writer M. John Harrison’s blog,The Ambient Hotel, which I found late on the night of April 9, 2010, inspired me to start this journal. His blog’s name is the conceit of a writer, suggesting a secret place meant to be the terrain of a circle of real, or imaginary, friends, all content to be off to the side in their own private, fulfilling worlds. Harrison is a writer who has carved out a personal world of characters and landscapes. He’s called a science fiction writer, but that description isn’t enough. His worlds are of the present and the past, and of the future.He is also a gifted photographer and his pictures regularly grace his website, along with news of his writing, his books, and his acclaim. In Climbers, he wrote well about one of his youthful passions, mountain climbing. A Facebook video of him reading his short story, Entertaining Angels Unawares, is here. He reads beautifully.

Here’s my first post on the journal: “In the beginning was the word. Someone actually wrote that down or said it for the first time somewhere sometime, and it’s a powerful perception still defying understanding, expressed most rigorously by Wittgenstein when he said something to the effect, ‘Language confuses meaning,’ as if, on the other hand, meaning doesn’t confuse language. At any rate, we’re here as we are, no doubt, partly as a result of words, spoken, written and unsaid, and we’re now forever  awash, swamped, drowned, awed by them all,  but still dry inside where from it all arises and passes away. This will do fine as my first post. But for this…I want to say that M. John Harrison is responsible, unknowingly, for me starting this internet journal. I saw a review he published, I think, in The Guardian, or somewhere like that. Its urgency rattled me so I looked him up, found his brilliant blog, and henceforth birthed this journal. Thanks, Mike.”