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.
Before you turn off completely in fear that the poem I found was actually found inside me and written out in my usual sadly mechanical verse style, I need to say that this poem, typed (clearly on a typewriter) and on flimsy looking but actually quite tough semi-transparent parchment paper (or at least this is … More Today I found a poem.
The poet is visiting Lighthouse Bookshop in Edinburgh on 11th March 7 p.m. I have enjoyed very much reading the debut volume of poetry by a new queer Black poet, Oluwayseun Olayiwola, called Strange Beach. For this blog, perhaps the first of two, I will concentrate on one poem because it centres on a compliment … More ‘I eat his friends’ / applause’: a poem on ‘a compliment’, perhaps: Oluwayseun Olayiwola’s ‘There is Nothing Like That Black Voice’
What is a Paper Candidate? The definition in Wikipedia is sufficient (see it as this link), though I balk at accepting the alternative name for it given there – a ‘no-hope candidate’. In becoming a paper candidate, I have no hope to win a seat but the act itself seems an expression of massive and … More Why be a paper-candidate? And why The Green Party!
Prompt questions like this assume the virtue of loss of self, and even of coordinates of such concepts in constructs like time and space. The chief architect of the development of that virtue- into a concept he claimed his research participants themselves used called ‘FLOW’ – is Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi in bis book, pictured below: I … More The constituents of ‘flow’ experience suggest that loss of self and time consciousness balances facing new challenges with willingness to learn, allowing neither to rest in stasis.
‘I don’t think I can write about my own life yet, but I’ve written it all down. … It’s funny how I’ve been writing stories about other people until now …’, says ‘Mambro’, the middle generation of the queer men as named by his nephew, in one Bangladeshi family. However, when Mambro told the story … More This blog discusses Santanu Bhattacharya’s 2025 wonderful queer novel, ‘Deviants’.
Celebrating the achievements of women through visibility: the means and the content of our celebration in Bishop Auckland Town Hall. Provincial venues continually stretch themselves as media of radical representation of supposedly silenced and supposedly invisible populations. Visibility is promoted as a political object in all kinds of ‘pride’ celebrations, that insist that the fact … More Celebrating the achievements of women through visibility: the means and the content of our celebration in Bishop Auckland Town Hall.
The problem with this film is that its central female character, Manon, is a kind of symbol and not a woman. The woman who I think matters in it is not her but Florette, whose life and death of repression and flight from the shame that births her son, Jean, and who generates the film’s … More Motion picture storytelling at its best: Claude Berri’s story of multiple competing male obsessions in his ‘Jean de Florette’ & ‘Manon des Sources’ films.
Superstition is very often a word that is pre-loaded with value judgments. In mainstream modern usage, with justification in the use of it by the ancients and in the history of Christianity. Rarly and continuing internal disputes in Christian tradition is larded with name-calling (in which being ‘superstitious’ is a claim made against sects being … More The danger of loaded words in questions.
Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not men? Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not men? Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is the Law. Are we not men? Not to claw the Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not men? Not to … More Unfortunately, it has to be the human animal
‘Would You Let Yourself In’ : Leigh Bowery’s inclusively exclusive or exclusively inclusive dilemma and other contradictions inside Leigh’s outside keeps us outside his inside. This is my blog reflecting on visiting the new Leigh Bowery exhibition at Tate Modern with the help of it the Tate’s publication Alice Chasey (Senior Ed.) [2025] Leigh Bowery! … More ‘Would You Let Yourself In’ : Leigh Bowery’s inclusively exclusive or exclusively inclusive dilemma and other contradictions inside Leigh’s outside keeps us outside his inside. This is my blog reflecting on visiting the new Leigh Bowery exhibition at Tate Modern with the help of it the Tate’s publication Alice Chasey (Ed.) [2025] ‘Leigh Bowery!’
Meet me in a book store that contains ourselves and the world together and apart. Lets’ go buy books or is it dreams, the painsAnd pleasures of a holiday abroadIn heaven, or is it Hell: where you learnMost about the state of the world or yourOwn soul, where these elements collide nowAnd again, collude or … More Meet me in a book store that contains ourselves and the world together and apart.
My blog yesterday ended with wondering about how unhelpful assumptions about Greek theatrical conventions can be and with a particular piece of the text of Carson’s translation of Elektra. It was the scene in which Orestes takes revenge on his mother in some place described in stage directions as ‘within’. On the Greek stage, this … More Fragments of response to ‘Oedipus’ at ‘The Old Vic’ & ‘Elektra ‘ at ‘The Duke of York’s Theatre, St. Martin’s Lane’. In lieu of a blog today.
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