Born in 1954. Chequered career including Lecturer in English, Social Worker and Lecturer in Social Work. Had breaks related to mental health that also meant I worked in social care. Now retired.
When Spain to monsters fell, OfeliaFollowed a Faun’s fairies to the hard heartLabyrinthine, there finding a Pale Man,Devoid of eyes in’s head, though in his palms,Hunted what they fed upon. Fair SpainBled when Pale Man bit off a fairy’s headAnd swallowed another because two grapesHad been consumed from off the fascists’ feast To tempt ordinary … More On First seeing Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’.
This prompt ties itself up in knots. It is the nature of WordPress prompts, so to do, in order perhaps to draw ouf variants in response, or, in the worst case scenario, because they rely on assumptions about commonsense definitions of complex words. First of all, they nearly always invoke indeterminate categories, such as ‘impact,’ … More Relationships of Causation or Correlation: Some playful ‘statistical rigour’ about event categories and their impacts on oneself.
Roused from his torpor, on a set of sandAnd potted jungle plants – the pots by handBuried in that sand – Johnny’s torsoRose, in expectation, although more soAs to see what they who viewed him wantedFrom that body, so wondrously vaunted.”Weissmüller! Be wise”. A quick scan overCaught at a glance, what was a sad botherOf … More Hey Johnny: Me, Tarzan, ….you, Cecil. Some queer verse less lush than its subject.
‘Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket’, 1875, which earned Ruskin’s scorn. Oil on panel, by Whistler, James Abbott McNeill (1834-1903); 60.2×46.7 cm; Detroit Institute of Arts, USA; © Detroit Institute of Arts ; Gift of Dexter M. Ferry Jr.; American, out of copyright. Credit: Bridgeman Images One of the strangest aspects of my … More To have ‘flung a pot of paint in the public’s face’ is the dynamic of beauty in painting and proceeds when done properly as if it were done by the painting itself: the case of James McNeill Whistler’s ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket’, 1875.
The ethical ideal is not to tamper with living things but does that extend to living tissue used in experimental study of brain connections? The example of laboratory cultured models of brain systems from living tissue in the laboratory in order to test what the variables are that might affect mental processes, as we think … More The ethical ideal is not to tamper with living things but does that extend to living tissue used in experimental study of brain connections? The example of laboratory cultured models of brain systems from living tissue
Technology – and the dream, of autonomy Posted on 17 December 2024 by Stevendouglasblog If we take the Wikipedia article on automobiles as an authority, the presumption of setting this as a prompt topic is surely that this is a blog for those interested in CARS. The term automobile, when first used in the Wiki entry … More Technology – and the dream, of autonomy
Castle Hill: A site from my childhood and its development as an idea about the nature of heritage. First submitted in another place: Sunday, 1 Apr 2018, 20:50 Castle Hill: A site from my childhood and its development as an idea about the nature of heritage. Submitted on April 1, 2018 Prompt Think about something … More Reissue: ‘Castle Hill: A site from my childhood and its development as an idea about the nature of heritage’.
Geoff and I are confined these days following Geoff’s serious illness, and we don’t think we can visit the great art exhibitions, theatre, or even cinema in the cities we would take pains to go to: Edinburgh, London, Manchester, Liverpool, or even the nearest of the great cities, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Macbeth knowing that his agents have … More Exhibiting the subject of ‘the local’ locally. What is local art? What do its images capture? A subject or a viewer?
;…, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the miners of God ascending on it, that they may descend thereafter’. [with apologies to Genesis 28 v. 12[1]] A dream vision based on Tom McGuinness‘ stained glass window on permanent display at Bishop Auckland … More ;…, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the miners of God ascending on it, that they may descend thereafter’. A dream vision based on Tom McGuinness’ stained glass window on permanent display at Bishop Auckland Town Hall, ‘Steps to the Shaft’, (2002).
A. Le Corbusier’s Tall Building Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles (1945-52) A844 Open Studio Set Exercise First issued in another place Friday, 12 Oct 2018, 10:00 Le Corbusier’s Tall Building Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles (1945-52) A844 Open Studio Set Exercise Photograph below: Roof level pool and children’s play areas at Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles (1945-52) from Jenkins, D. (1999) … More Reissue: A set Of Tall Building blogs from an old course.
Photo by Rick Pushinsky of Richard Layard: the ‘happiness Tsar’ under the Tony Blair regime from Annie Maccoby Berglof article in ‘The Financial Times’ ( September 12 2014) available at: https://www.ft.com/content/b1d0b140-3386-11e4-85f1-00144feabdc0 We hear much less of ‘happiness’ since the termination of the Blair-Brown government but perhaps it will return under Keir Starmer, who needs an ideology to … More The ‘happiness Tsar’: the ideology of well-being despite every circumstance.
Let’s wait for a moment on a peak in Darién Province in Panama in South America. Why are we waiting? We got to Darién Province, not through its history of colonisation, though it is a fairly interesting story, having seen off the ill-fated Scottish mercantile project of subsuminf it to Scottish rule in the eighteenth … More A ‘wild surmise’ whilst ‘Silent, upon a peak in Darien’.
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