A Death in The Family (My struggle book 1) - Karl Ove Knausgaard - day - well I've lost count

Well past the half way mark in this now, and reading some astonishingly raw and real passages - it is a reflective book that makes you reflect in a similar way, so a proper journey. Absorbing, all that stuff people say when they really get int a book, but with a sometimes uncomfortable grittiness that is itself the thing that makes it so absorbing. 

I'm starting to look at some other blogs now, having followed a link from Facebook for one, and found another through looking up some New Agey type training thing - Landmark - which appears to be a direct descendant of Erhart sensitivity training.  Realise that there are all sorts of people who love being pushed to be positive, nay shouted at, forced to cry tears of joy, forced catharsis - all great stuff if you can a) afford it (they charge a lot) and b) have enough credulity to take it all on board. It's the next step from all those inspiring quotes and pictures you get reposted on Facebook, and works off the premise that people really do want to change, and there's gold in them psyches.

I can't talk - I loved all the ecounter groups and therapy groups in the 1970s and early 80s, loved the emotional thrill I got from them - but then they were mostly free. Or self organised - we ran a "therapists group" for some years. I certainly got a lot of self knowledge out of them, and learnt alot about whant made me and others tick. I'm sure I'd be a vey different person if I hadn't undergone them, but, but, but that hasn't stopped me from hurling headlong into things I shouldn't, making dreadful mistakes - or you could say it has helped me do things just right, live a fulfilling creative and happy life, understand where I coming from and where I'm going.

The new play is going to be about that pivotal point when you have achieved - well achieved enough, and you have this choice between continual play and hedonism, and something else potentially of more service and good. 

Brighton Fringe - Sleeping Trees Odyssey, A Death in the Family day - whatever! lost count now, BaggageVarious

A blog is just like a large book - a way though it you get sidetracked and read / write something else. In Brighton Festival time now so reviewing shows almost every night. The first one was a cracker - three man improvised show and none the worst for that. Funny , fizzing with physical inventiveness - I suppose I could post the whole review here, but I'll wait and post the link to the review sites once it's published.

Still reading A Death in the Family, which has some great sustained lyrical writing about being a teenager, first love - it does get that sense of the romantic that overwhelms the sexual, while being so tied up with it.  There's a wonderful passage where he is upstairs with one of his fiorst girl friends, and she takes off her top and bares her breasts.He is, of course  transfixed, but also strangely unmoved - and it captures that huge adolescent sex drive, where all you think you want is access to those mysterious warm folds of a woman's body only to find that there is something missing if the romance isn't there.  I think this compares well with the female experience of having sex and finding it underwhelming and not that exciting (well described in Janet Street-Porters autobiography Baggage, that I just read in one day a few days ago,and countless other women's biogs and fiction).