John Baker’s Blog

It weren’t me I don’t ‘member being there. No sir.
This’s not how I’d do and I never left this place to do nothing. Not me. I’d sure ‘member something like that. I’m not going down for something like that. I’m clean in this respect.
Permission to speak, sir?
Some other guy might’ve but I wasn’t the one [...]

How much are we allowed to know about those we love?
Joseph’s crippling post-traumatic stress comes from an incident that happened during his time in the army in Ireland. The event itself may not have been traumatic to another soldier. Someone was killed, but only during the normal course of duty. There was no bomb involved, [...]

An interview with Pierre Bayard in The New York Times:
You write in your book about Montaigne, who confessed to having a poor memory and to forgetting about books he himself had written. Which leads you to ask: If we read a book and forget that we read it, is that the same as never [...]

Why something goes into a writer’s notebook is fairly obvious. The notebook is there to replace memory. Memory is fragile and in any case it’s creative. A notebook on the other hand is not at all fragile. It’s a recording device. You have the thought, or you come across a group of words or an [...]