As always with WordPress prompts there seems to be an agenda based on how a word is used in the immediate present of culture. After all only that could explain being asked for ‘your definition’ of a word, as if any words were amenable to purely personal definition and its use by that person validated … More Literally fabulous or confabulated – the dream of romance
What notable things happened today? This fable is entirely fictitious though thought about after seeing today the memorials to some soul now sadly lost to us from Newton Cap Viaduct, that I photographed and append to this verse. Newton Cap Viaduct: Eleven Arches The Land of Aucks they called the home they took, The Prince … More The Darling Buds of May: a fable
Is patience is the name given by Stoics and Christians to ‘the time we waste in waiting and longing for change’ so that it seems to be of the greatest value of all things? “It’s very dree work, waiting,” says ‘Old Alice’ in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton of waiting for news of her lost sailor … More Is patience is the name given by Stoics and Christians to ‘the time we waste in waiting and longing for change’ so that it seems to be of the greatest value of all things?
Above: Tom McGuinness ‘Waiting for the Cage’. Below: Charon the ferryman on the Styx: Gustav Dore illustrates Dante. It was not right that once you died, you’d haveTo wait in line for some old ferryman. We knew that warped boat from Charon’sBetter days, when tiaras and gildedMen of the church were the best passengers And … More Waiting for the Cage: apologies to Tom McGuinness
‘So I have taken to projecting myself – a sort of caricature of a toff. … don’t you think it is ironic that to fit in to this alien society I have to highlight and exaggerate the differences between myself and the people I want to get on with’.[1] This whimsical blog comes from reading: … More This whimsical blog comes from reading: Kit Fraser (1985) ‘Toff Down Pit’ London, Quartet Books.
Let’s say my favourite ‘historical character’ is a mixture Pedro Almodóvar and Jacques Lacan, who are both ambivalent about mirrors. This blog reflects on stories in Pedro Almodóvar (2025) The Last Dream (translated by Frank Wynne) Harvill Secker London (Penguin, Random House). This blog has to be a bit circumspect about the concept of the … More Let’s say my favourite ‘historical character’ is a mixture of Pedro Almodóvar and Jacques Lacan, who are both ambivalent about mirrors. This blog reflects on stories in Pedro Almodóvar (2025) ‘The Last Dream’
“Can you decline history”(! Or ?) [1] The meaning of Getrude Stein’s life, writing and relationships might lie in the fact that we do not begin to determine our futures without, in one way or other, deciding how we re-member and then revise the fragmented biographies of ourselves, others and our group histories. Can revised … More “Can you decline history”(! Or ?) This blog digs into the deep soil out of which a new biography of Gertrude Stein grows: Francesca Wade (2025) ‘Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife’.
‘… the name dear me the name was the same it was Rose and under Rose was Willy and under Willy was Billie. / It made Rose feel very funny it really did’. [0] The Ethics of name-dropping and innuendo finding in Gertrude Stein’s (1939) The World Is Round London, B.T. Batsford Ltd. I have … More ‘… the name dear me the name was the same it was Rose and under Rose was Willy and under Willy was Billie. / It made Rose feel very funny it really did’. The propriety and ethics of name-dropping (and innuendo finding) in Gertrude Stein’s (1939) ‘The World Is Round’ London, B.T. Batsford Ltd.
In the Elizabethan theatre a secluded space off stage and curtained, or otherwise partitioned off, and called a ‘tiring house’ acted as as a place in which actors went when they left the stage on which they performed their role or roles: it served two purposes. It was a place in which actors changed their … More Retiring? Never and always simultaneously and repetitively is the only answer, however contradictory that is!
Describe your dream chocolate bar. Used as an adjective here, the word ‘dream’ is usually thought to have the equivalent meaning as, to some extent, clearer adjectives like ‘perfect’ or ‘ideal’, but the force of the meaning of the noun persists, which describes an event that occurs entirely within the person, and with the same … More The problems of expression with exactitude: how to start thinking about Gertrude Stein as a meta-writer [a writer who writes mainly about the nature of writing].
‘The linoleum, too, … is blue. So blue you’ll have the feeling of being swept away because you are, into a current of corridors intentionally too narrow to turn around in’.[1] Queer writers have so long challenged the false universals of heteronormative stability, and perhaps privileged the discourse of sexual interaction as a panacea for … More I am passionate about the role of reading and the redemption of material life it carries with it. This is a blog on Ocean Vuong (2025) ‘The Emperor of Gladness’
‘… uniforms did not just shape and display a disciplined male body but also guided and excited the gazing eye in particular ways’.[1] This is a blog about the role of the uniform in the construction of the object of queer desire in the contexts of the militarisation of social, political and psychosexual cultures based … More This is a blog about the role of the uniform in the construction of the object of queer desire in the contexts of the militarisation of social, political and psychosexual cultures based on reading Jeffrey Schneider (2023) ‘Uniform Fantasies: Soldiers, Sex, and Queer Emancipation in Imperial Germany’.
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