So much information

Its always the paradox of any sort of diary that the more you have going on in your life the less time there is for reflection. Shall we say its been a busy week, and a busier day. The Manchester Literature Festival made its way to my place of work today, with the Decapolis writers, an architect and an artist discussing interpretations of the city. It was fascinating, and everything that the "original modern" discussion with Peter Saville on Tuesday wasn't. I think I'm in love with Berlin's Larissa Boehning, but everyone was fascinating - and the only down side was that you had to remember the last time you'd been to "reading" rather than a "debate" that was this interesting. I think all of us think that fiction is more important than all the other stuff, yet here we never really talked about writing, and certainly never heard any of the fiction. David Constantine made the point that some writers (I'm assuming he's meaning Kazuo Ishiguro who has said this) are writing for an international audience nowadays, and as translator he finds this lessening of "difference" a worry. We're getting Starbucks writers, I guess. Yet there's no sign on the behalf of publishers that they're encouraging anything other. So "language" is a negotiable I think. And it shouldn't be. Later...rather than go to the Burgess project thing at the Whitworth, which I'm sure was fine and dandy, I went elsewhere and got into a conversation with a group of pissed air traffic controllers in Bar Centro. If anyone's flying tomorrow, they're on earlies.