Olivia Laing tells us as her book The Garden Against Time closes that she loves a line  from the fourteenth-century Psalter by Richard Rolle: This boke is cald garden closed, wel enseled, paradyse full of appils’. In contrast she goes on to say that her ‘book is a garden opened and spilling over. The common … More Olivia Laing thinks the answer to this question is to ‘cultivate your garden’. But she shows us what a political act that is!

A ‘rolling description’ is where I post early on the day of an event and keep updating it as the experience I am trying to recount occurs. It is now 6.30 a.m on the 28th May and I am looking forward to friends Rob and Linda Goffee arriving(about 11 a.m. we think, to leave for … More It is joyful to visit mutual interests with friends. A rolling description of visiting The Laing Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, to see ‘Turner: Art, Industry & Nostalgia’, on Tuesday, 28 May 2024.

Erich Fromm distinguishes a healthy culture of ‘being’ from the diseased cultures obsessed by ‘having it all’. However you define ‘all’ in that phrase, it is the acme of a diseased culture ruled by individual greed alone. The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm was an iconoclast of amd from many traditions in which he was nevertheless embedded, … More Erich Fromm distinguishes a healthy culture of ‘being’ from the diseased cultures created by capitalist ideology, obsessed by individuals dreaming of ‘having it all’. However you define ‘all’ in that phrase, it is the acme of a diseased culture ruled by individual greed alone.

“Strictly speaking,” said Mr. Strict DyasDust, who spent his life correcting others, “this question is nonsense because it uses the word ‘practice’ as a verb whereas it is only a noun. Ask me, if I practise religion, or do not ask at all”. In the UK there probably are people who still care about the … More An Atlantic of a difference in ‘How I Practise as a person following a religion’ or ‘Practicing religion’. And then my answer!

Of course, having been born in 1954 and schooled in the sixties, I remember that time. My first computer was an early Amstrad bought in the 1990s. Even in the 1970s, I was subnitting essays at UCL in my own handwriting and using real books in real libraries. We now call that using hard copies. That fact … More X’d. From communication to controlling others in one social media application, once called Twitter. It did not need to be thus.