Interviewed in 1969 for The Observer, Rhys sought to ‘distance herself from the women whom she wrote in her novels. While agreeing that they often underwent similar experiences to their author, and bore an acknowledged resemblance to aspects of her personality, Rhys pointed to a crucial difference. They were victims. She herself was not’.[1] This … More Rhys sought to ‘distance herself from the women whom she wrote in her novels. While agreeing that they often underwent similar experiences to their author, and bore an acknowledged resemblance to aspects of her personality, Rhys pointed to a crucial difference. They were victims. She herself was not’. This blog reflects on the high quality of a biography by Miranda Seymour (2022) ‘I Used To Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys’

Ian Massey, in his superb but sadly out-of-print monograph of Patrick Procktor, helps us to see again the power of this artist’s intelligent defence of an aspect of painting that the artist named ‘theatrical’. It re-opens a perspective on art that is no longer represented in mainstream art history, or is perhaps actively suppressed. For … More Ian Massey helps us to see again the power of Patrick Procktor’s intelligent defence of an aspect of painting that the artist named ‘theatrical’. Procktor’s summary of what was required in the development of modern painting was to say: “It is the expressive possibilities of the imagination which need to be extended.”’[1]  This blog uses Ian Massey’s (2010) ‘Patrick Procktor: Art and Life’

‘I did more research on Alan Cumming for the writing of this book than I have ever done for any character I have ever portrayed’.[1] This blog focuses implicitly on the fascination readers and festival goers seem to have for observing celebrity (or ‘seeing stars’) and reading their ‘stories’.  This blog looks at why I … More ‘I did more research on Alan Cumming for the writing of this book than I have ever done for any character I have ever portrayed’. This blog looks at why I booked to see Alan Cumming at the 2022 Edinburgh Book Festival on Sunday 21st August. It uses … my reading of a recent memoir (his second) by Alan Cumming [2021] ‘Baggage: Tales From A Packed Life’ (pictured). The blog is updated after seeing the event.

‘Firm as A Rock We Stand the banner sings / but a limestone arch thrown up in the year dot / collapsed in pity after the last door / was slammed shut – a marooned stack now sulks’. This stanza from Simon Armitage’s lyric for the song by LYR, ‘Marsden By The Sea’ challenges us … More ‘Firm as A Rock We Stand the banner sings / but a limestone arch thrown up in the year dot / collapsed in pity after the last door / was slammed shut – a marooned stack now sulks’. This blog reflects on an event held in Durham Cathedral on the 15th July 2022 in which a work commissioned from Armitage and LYR by the Durham Brass Festival 2022 was performed by them with the Easington Colliery Brass Band. The work performed takes the title, ‘Firm As A Rock I Stand’.

‘Painting, as Patrick Heron said, is a materialist art, about the material world. The novel, however it aspires to the specificity of Zola’s naturalism, works inside the head’. [1] This blog reflects on Honoré de Balzac’s ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’, the limitations of theory of how art works as a path to producing or appreciating it, … More ‘Painting, as Patrick Heron said, is a materialist art, about the material world. The novel, however it aspires to the specificity of Zola’s naturalism, works inside the head’. This blog reflects on Honoré de Balzac’s ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’, the limitations of theory of how art works as a path to producing or appreciating it, and the assertive brilliance of A.S. Byatt (2001) ‘Portraits in Fiction’

At a crucial movement in this queer romance, two young American men at college together confront the manner of their love for each other, as one of these men also faces the fact that his mother, in another room of the home the men are visiting will soon die: ‘Desire, yes, but for something else, … More ‘Desire, yes, but for something else, for this space where they stood so close, for the quiet of it’. In an ‘Author’s Note’, Grimsley points out an anachronism in his novel relating to a Buñuel ‘movie’ mentioned therein: ‘ “That Obscure Object of Desire” was not released until later in the year that I depict but the title of the movie suited my purposes too well to lose’. This blog reflects on Jim Grimsley’s (2022) ‘The Dove in the Belly’

Ian Massey puts the mind of a community of queer artists and ‘others’ at the centre of his account of St. Ives. Massey constructs at one point a description of graphics, used by sculptor John Milne in his psychodynamic (Jungian) therapy, of the artist’s own ‘inner life’.  His words, for me as a reader at … More ‘abstract expressions of inner life that, in contrast with the formal containment and smooth surfaces of much of [the sculpture described herein], read as maps of his state of mind. Usually made in materials of charcoal, pastel or crayon, many are of disorientating spaces: vortexes, tunnels and dead ends’. This blog contends that what is achieved in Ian Massey’s new book is a kind of beautiful and wondrous psychosocial geography indicating why queer people need that such communally local pictures of shared lives URGENTLY require writing.  This blog reflects on Massey’s (2022) ‘Queer St Ives and Other Stories’.

Alan Hollinghurst, in an introduction to the book detailing the current retrospective exhibition of the work of Glyn Philpot at Pallant House, Chichester, says that the ‘cumulative impression’ he has taken from knowing the artist’s work is of Philpot’s ‘masterly conformity in lifelong tension with the disruptive and innovatory force of his sexuality’.[1] This impression … More Alan Hollinghurst says that the ‘cumulative impression’ he has taken from knowing the artist’s work is of Philpot’s ‘masterly conformity in lifelong tension with the disruptive and innovatory force of his sexuality’. This blog reflects on the 2022 book by Simon Martin, ‘Glyn Philpot: Flesh and Spirit’

From the very beginning Don Lamb, one of  ‘a clerisy of  bachelor dons’ seems to feel that the ‘span of time’ that is the summation of his life-story is both interpreted and sanctified by his being seen as the ‘embodiment of art history in Cambridge’: ‘The tautology of his name has always pleased him. Donnish, … More ‘The tautology of his name has always pleased him. Donnish, serious, dignified – that is how his life has been. … Sometimes the span of time seems like nothing. … His thoughts are the mirror image of Cambridge’s unchanging vistas, his mind sustained by the rituals of academic life’. This blog reflects on the 2022 novel by James Cahill, ‘Tiepolo Blue’ (London, Sceptre).

LIVERPOOL 2022 VISIT summary at end: ‘To be or not to be’! Let’s reflect on why some of us are not satisfied by art exhibitions that don’t convince us that they have one overarching, clear and coherent reason that justifies them making a show of themselves. This is a blog reflecting on how and why … More LIVERPOOL 2022 VISIT summary at end: ‘To be or not to be’! This is a blog reflecting on how and why I was somewhat disappointed in two art exhibitions currently showing in Liverpool both containing some enormously significant individual works of art. These are ‘The Tudors: Passion, Power and Politics’, a National Portrait Gallery exhibition at the Walker Gallery & ‘Radical Landscapes: Art, identity and Activism’ at Tate Liverpool.

‘Who taught them to hide? They never wondered. They were only curious fingers in the dark. You like it? Somadina said, not in a voice that he would use with the girls and women years away, he’d not yet learned to treat pleasing someone else as an act that affirmed his power over them’.[1] Reflecting … More ‘Who taught them to hide? They never wondered. They were only curious fingers in the dark. You like it? Somadina said, not in a voice that he would use with the girls and women years away, he’d not yet learned to treat pleasing someone else as an act that affirmed his power over them’. Reflecting on the short story by  Arinze Ifeakandu, ‘Happy Is a Doing Word’, published in the ‘Kenyon Review’ May/June 2022 Vol. 44, No. 3, 45 – 66.

Sophus Helle, in a new translation of the ancient poem Gilgamesh, speaks of the controversy surrounding descriptions of the relationship between its hero Gilgamesh and Enkidu since Thorkild Jacobsen in 1930 (using a word with at the time a relatively brief history of forty years) first called it a ‘homosexual’ one. Helle stresses instead that … More Sophus Helle, in a new translation of the ancient poem ‘Gilgamesh’, speaks of the controversy surrounding descriptions of the relationship between its hero Gilgamesh and Enkidu since Thorkild Jacobsen in 1930 (using a word with at the time a relatively brief history of forty years) first called it a ‘homosexual’ one. Helle stresses that the relationship’s participants ‘do not explicate the nature of their feelings for one another. …, it is as if they want to leave their bond undefined by words, shapeless in all its intensity’. A reflection on Sophus Helle’s 2021 book, ‘A New Translation of the Ancient Epic, GILGAMESH, with Essays on the Poem, its Past and its Passion’.