Steve_Bamlett_blog

The best gift I have ever received is to allow darkness and obscurity to work on me, as in preference to relying only on what people present as light and clarity, or as Lorca says, ‘La luz me troncha las alas / y el dolor de mi tristeza / va mojando los recuerdos / en … More The best gift I have ever received is to allow darkness and obscurity to work on me, as in preference to relying only on what people present as light and clarity, or as Lorca says, ‘La luz me troncha las alas / y el dolor de mi tristeza / va mojando los recuerdos / en la fuente de la idea’. [Translated by D K. Fennell: ‘The light trims my wings / and the pang of my gloom / will moisten the memories / at the font of knowledge’ (the last line seems somewhat to travesty the Spanish)]. What follows is a blog containing some dark or obscure (for Lorca’s ‘oscura’) thoughts about Lorca as invoked by a new novel: Neil Rollinson (2026) ‘The Dead Don’t Bleed’.

‘…, I no longer blamed myself for the sexual assaults I’d survived. I saw it like this: I could let myself sink in self-blame and self-pity or I could float and swim in this open water full of ambiguity’. (p. 241) ‘Love is abundant, an unlimited resource’ (p. 256). The aesthetics of the unlimited in … More If people really chose to be around those that offered most to them, they would not choose people by their limitations. Let’s go for people like Dean Atta, as described in his 2024 memoir, ‘Person Unlimited: An Ode to My Black Queer body’.

Let’s take a break from the malign influence of the populist feminists’ treatment of binary sexual difference, as, in Foucault’s words, ‘a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning’. Simple formulae validating themselves as ‘biological science’, not biological oversimplification,  have popular appeal but undermine equality based on diversity. Let’s celebrate Stephen F. Eisenman (1989) ‘Gauguin’s Skirt’, London, … More Let’s take a break from the malign influence of the rightwards-tending populist feminists’ treatment of binary sexual difference, as, in Foucault’s words, ‘a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning’. Simple formulae have popular appeal but undermine equality based on diversity. Let’s celebrate Stephen F. Eisenman (1989) ‘Gauguin’s Skirt’, London, Thames & Hudson.

‘Cooking the Books’ is a phrase used so regularly to mean ‘falsifying financial accounts for the purpose of tax avoidance or impressing company shareholders, that we forget that any book is entirely a preparation, often refined to high degrees of their readership’s taste, of raw materials that have cruder forms – forms less satisfying to … More Let’s cook the books!