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.
The ‘intentional fallacy’ was proposed by Wimsatt and Beardsley in 1954 in The Verbal Icon. It suggested that no work of art, especially a literary one, should be read with an assumption that the author’s ‘intention’ with regard to the poem’s meaning or function as discourse should or indeed can be made. Yet scholarship remained … More Being ‘other than the things I touch’
Making a man of yourself – the strain of the 1950s Image from The Science Museum archive: https://coimages.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/58/936/large_2000_0549.jpg (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) We all assume we know what DIY means (without troubling to extend the acronym to the term DO IT YOURSELF). However, it was not always thus as the ‘Brief History of DIY’ page from … More Making a man of yourself for yourself – the strain of the 1950s
Is a day being a mythical version of someone else, worth the crashing out afterwards? “Jackie is just speedin’ away / Thought she was James Dean for a day / Then I guess she had to crash / Valium would have helped that bash”. It feels easier for me to say why not I would … More Is a day being a mythical version of someone else, worth the crashing out afterwards? “Jackie is just speedin’ away / Thought she was James Dean for a day / Then I guess she had to crash / Valium would have helped that bash”.
Imagining yourself giving advice to your own teenage self is a thing more strange than we like to think. It is one of those moments when we see ourself as ‘double’, having two characters in one moment that interact with each other, sometimes in a contest of power and / or authority. There is because … More “And these few precepts in thy memory /Look thou character”. This is not how to be ‘yourself’ – whatever that means!
‘No two corpses are the same’, the surgeon,In forensic and appropriate blankTone, as blank as this verse reversing onItself. ‘They are alike only when sankIn sordid life’. Yet only as a corpseIs a body named a ‘like’, a word likeThat ‘lych’ that names the gated part of t’porchOn which dead bodies rest, or that old … More If I would like to ban a word, it would be a word like ‘like’, like!
‘People who make things also have an ambiguous relationship with time. … Its surprising hard to gauge the rate at which time passes – whether it moves faster for others than it does for you’.[1]Appreciating the motion of passing time in Tracy Chevalier (2024) The Glassmaker London, The Borough Press. Is it a spoiler to … More ‘People who make things also have an ambiguous relationship with time’. Appreciating the motion of passing time in Tracy Chevalier (2024) The Glassmaker London, The Borough Press.
Hippocrene source on Mount Helicon By GOFAS – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11613794 Like everyone else I fancy a sip of the Hippocrene. Above is a photograph claiming to be the real source of the river on Mount Helicon, long famed in mythology as the haunt of the Muses – those nymphs responsible for … More Drinking to ‘leave the world unseen’ or drinking ‘life to the lees’
Choose to be around people who make you wonder. ‘How beauteous mankind is! O, brave new world / That has such people in’t’ When one’s untutored eyes are opened the world is full of potential. Is that only because ‘’Tis new to’ us? The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) is aiming to bring young people into ‘First Encounters’ with Shakespeare’s drama and spoken poetry. How did they fare with … More Choose to be around people who make you wonder. ‘How beauteous mankind is! O, brave new world / That has such people in’t’ When one’s untutored eyes are opened the world is full of potential. Is that only because ‘’Tis new to’ us?
The phrase ‘walk a mile in another person’s’s shoes is usually interpreted as a call to empathy – an admonition asking you to feel pinching you as they do them, ”the experiences, challenges, thought processes’ of the person’ before you judge them. White cultures often appropriate the wisdom of other cultures but there is no … More To favour walking in another person’s shoes, or mocassins (or whatever) needn’t be in order to empathise with them.
This blog prompt is almost identical to a earlier one (see my answer here at this link). The title there was: What is the greatest gift someone could give you? Put yourself in a prompter’s shoes! What difference did they see in the prompts? Well, first, the question asked then for a chosen ‘one’ out … More The ‘pattern of all patience’ is not to ‘say nothing’ but to ask and expect nothing.
Is Macbeth truly about a man straining for greatness, or is it more accurately a ‘woman’s story at a winter’s fire’ that shows the true heights to which the masculine can aspire? This blog is on the live-streaming of Max Webster’s Macbeth starring David Tennant and Cush Jumbo. I am always resistant when the opportunity to see Macbeth arises, with … More This blog is on the live-streaming of Max Webster’s ‘Macbeth’, starring David Tennant and Cush Jumbo.
Budgets are, you might think, something business corporations or Governments have. In both cases they balance real or expected (or predicted) income or revenue against real or expected (or predicted) expenditure in order to be able to plan to meet their goals whilst remaining fiscally in the balance, over at least an acceptable period of … More ‘You find me fallen back for a spring, and I have every reason to believe that a vigorous leap will shortly be the result’. Even when we are rich in time and capacity for thought and feeling, why do we tend to be so miserly with it?
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