“And these few precepts in thy memory /Look thou character”. This is not how to be ‘yourself’ – whatever that means!

February 17, 2025

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!

If I would like to ban a word, it would be a word like ‘like’, like!

February 16, 2025

‘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’. Appreciating the motion of passing time in Tracy Chevalier (2024) The Glassmaker London, The Borough Press.

February 15, 2025

‘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.

Drinking to ‘leave the world unseen’ or drinking ‘life to the lees’

February 14, 2025

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?

February 13, 2025

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?

To favour walking in another person’s shoes, or mocassins (or whatever) needn’t be in order to empathise with them.

February 12, 2025

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.

The ‘pattern of all patience’ is not to ‘say nothing’ but to ask and expect nothing.

February 11, 2025

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.

This blog is on the live-streaming of Max Webster’s ‘Macbeth’, starring David Tennant and Cush Jumbo.

February 10, 2025

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.

‘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?

February 9, 2025

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?

The ‘gnomic aperçu’ seemed once to be the quest of the literary academy. John Banville tells us that apparent words of arcane wisdom often turn out to be ‘academic writing at its most convoluted, most resistant and most sterile, the deathless products of the publish-or-perish academic treadmill’. [1]

February 8, 2025

It seems odd to take as the text behind a blog not a great work reviewed but the review itself. Nevertheless today I do just this. John Banville is a great reviewer – the grim and rather schoolmasterly distaste for orthodoxy in which he specialises makes him a resistible public speaker but a novelist of … More The ‘gnomic aperçu’ seemed once to be the quest of the literary academy. John Banville tells us that apparent words of arcane wisdom often turn out to be ‘academic writing at its most convoluted, most resistant and most sterile, the deathless products of the publish-or-perish academic treadmill’. [1]

A blog on the beautiful new novel by Adrian Duncan ‘The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth’ (2025)

February 7, 2025

‘…, and yet there is something in the form that does not make sense to me’.[1] The beautiful new novel by Adrian Duncan The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth (2025) imagines a project in which the ‘history from within’ is sought of ‘selected sculptures’.[2]  That history in a novel extends to the people who work  … More A blog on the beautiful new novel by Adrian Duncan ‘The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth’ (2025)

Oscar Wilde is reported as saying the law ‘is an ass’, but was to find that some asses had incredible power to hurt.

February 6, 2025

Oscar Wilde is reported as saying the law ‘is an ass’ (as are many others – it is actually a misquotation of lawman Dogberry in Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing’), but was to find that some asses had incredible power to hurt. I was born in 1954. The law was part of a vast symbolic … More Oscar Wilde is reported as saying the law ‘is an ass’, but was to find that some asses had incredible power to hurt.